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Sunrisers Hyderabad and Australia captain Pat Cummins recently talked about the role of team owners in the set-up, and how everyone in the team handled the transfer of captaincy from him to Ishan Kishan in the early part of the season.
SRH sealed their place in the IPL 2026 playoffs with their win over Chennai Super Kings in Chennai on Monday, but there is still work to do if they are to finish in the top two and earn two shots at making the IPL final.
Ishan Kishan stood in place of Pat Cummins
Pat Cummins suffered a lower back injury in July last year. Since then, he has barely played any cricket and was restricted to just one match for the rest of 2025.
Cummins played in the third Ashes Test against England last December, but was ruled out of the other four Tests and all limited-overs matches. Due to injury, he could not play in the T20 World Cup in India and Sri Lanka earlier this year.
When he arrived in the IPL, he was trying to recover from injury and had to play only the second half of the tournament. Cummins has played only 6 of SRH’s 13 matches this year, with Ishan Kishan captaining him in the first half.
Kishan was named captain due to his performances in the Syed Mushtaq Ali Trophy last year. In that tournament, he led Jharkhand to the trophy by finishing as the tournament’s leading run-scorer, paving the way for his return to the Indian team for the T20 World Cup.
I said Ishan would be great as a captain – Pat Cummins
In an interview with NDTV on the sidelines of an event in New Delhi, Cummins talked about the role of owners in the team and how they had helped Ishan Kishan when the Jharkhand wicketkeeper took charge of SRH.
When asked how the owners had reacted after SRH failed to reach the playoffs last year, Cummins said they were ‘great’ and that he was sorry that SRH might have missed out.
“The owners have been great. The first half of last year, I don’t think we played anywhere near our potential. We won our last three or four games (last season), so that showed we were in line with the style we wanted to play. With any other team we’ve been at our best.”
“We came into this season knowing that last season was as bad as we could play. Some of the new players have also adopted an aggressive style that has allowed us success,” he said. When asked whether he had anything to do with Kishan being made captain, Pat Cummins replied in the affirmative.
“We had some good options. He (Kishan) has had a great domestic season as captain. I was asked a question (on stand-in captaincy), and I said, ‘Oh, Ishan would be great, the boys love him.’ that was amazing. I let him do his thing. I didn’t get involved much, but I was there if he needed me. He knows how to captain well, so I stayed out of his way,” Cummins said.
SRH led by Pat Cummins and Ishan Kishan
It doesn’t seem like the divided captaincy has hurt Sunrisers Hyderabad’s campaign much as they are now in the last four. The season had a rough start, with Ishan Kishan leading the team to 3 defeats in the first four matches. But he turned things around by leading the team to three consecutive wins.
When Pat Cummins came, he extended the winning streak twice, but then the team went on the pattern of alternating wins and losses. Overall, under Kishan, SRH have won 4 out of 7 matches, while under Cummins, they have won 4 out of 6 matches in IPL 2026.
Also read: Pat Cummins gives bold statement on Vaibhav Suryavanshi while taking aim at IPL 2026 trophy
