Odds favour Sunrisers

Hyderabad: Sunrisers Hyderabad (SRH) opens its home campaign of the seventh edition of the Indian Premier League (IPL) against lowly placed defending champion, Mumbai Indians, at the Rajiv Gandhi International Cricket Stadium here on Monday.

The visiting team is virtually struggling to make it to the semifinals and justify its sixth edition triumph while Sunrisers seem better placed for a last four berth.

Although, they have notched up some crucial wins on Indian soil, after a nightmarish outing in the Middle East, Mumbai has a tough task on hand as the odds are stacked heavily against them.

This comes in contrast to the resurgence of Hyderabad, which is going from strength to strength. Added to that in its debut season, SRH had a dream beginning and was particularly awesome on home ground.

In a virtual do-or-die situation, Mumbai Indians will have to look for a good win or drop any plans of making it to the last four grade while Sunrisers have jumped ot fourth in the points table following’s Saturday’s win over Delhi Daredevils.

The Hyderabad side is already among the top four having won four out of the eight matches it played so far.

Mumbai will depend on the hard-hitting in-form Kieron Pollard, Mike Hussey, Corey Anderson to come good while the bowling has been badly handicapped in the absence of Zaheer Khan. It can still look to Lasith Malinga, Praveen Kumar, Harbhajan Singh and Pragyan Ojha who will be playing on home turf.

The host will hope that Shikhar Dhawan, Darren Sammy (who has since quit Test cricket), Aaron Fitch and David Warner will jell as a good batting line up and deliver.

The wily Dale Steyn, Bhuvneshwar Kumar, Karn Sharma, Amit Mishra, Ishant Sharma and Irfan Pathan, can bear the bowling brunt to winning levels.

Showers over the last 48 hours and the weekend sunlight make the pith particularly unpredictable.

On the face of it, though Sunrisers will go into the match with the decisive psychological advantage following some morale-boosting impressive wins.