Shane Watson feels that Pat Cummins is going to be a really important person heading into the IPL 2024 final and feels his experience of winning a World Cup as skipper will be handy for SRH. Hyderabad reached the final, thanks to their win over RR on May 24, Friday.
With this, Cummins will now be leading a team into the IPL final after his exploits with the Australian team in the World Test Championship and ODI World Cup 2023 summit clashes. Speaking to Jio Cinema, Watson said that the confidence Hyderabad would get with Cummins as a leader would be massive given that he has already captained a team in the biggest sport event in cricket in the form of the ODI World Cup.
"The confidence that having Pat Cummins as a leader will bring into the SRH team is knowing that he has captained under pressure in the biggest sports event in cricket, in the ODI World Cup just recently last year. So having that confidence in your leader to know, under pressure, he's gonna say the right things and know just the nuances that he will, um, be really across in a such a high-pressure situation. So, Pat Cummins certainly is good to be a really important person in the lead up to to the game on Sunday, but also in the melting pot of a final as well," said Watson.
Cummins' captaincy skills were on full display during Qualifier 2 in Chennai. After being put into bat, Hyderabad posted 175 runs in the first innings on the back of Heinrich Klaasen's fifty and cameos from Rahul Tripathi and Travis Head.
Thankfully for SRH, dew didn't come in during the second innings and Cummins was smart to bring in Shahbaz Ahmed and Abhishek Sharma into the mix with the ball. The spin duo picked up 5 wickets for 47 runs in 8 overs as the game turned on its head.
The RR batters, apart from Dhruv Jurel and Yashasvi Jaiswal, struggled to find any rhythm and SRH won the game by 36 runs.
