After cruising over Delhi Daredevils to seal a 9-wicket win here at the Feroz Shah Kotla stadium on Thursday, Sunrisers Hyderabad pace bowler Sandeep Sharma gave full credit to Daredevils batsman Rishabh Pant for his rampant innings without taking away anything from his team's bowling department.
In Thursday's IPl encounter between Delhi and Hyderabad, Pant took the Sunrisers bowlers by storm as he went on to tally an unbeaten 128 off 63 deliveries to help the home side post a challenging 187-run target.
"I don't think there was a flaw in our bowling," Sharma said after the match. "We have bowled really fine throughout the tournament. But tonight Rishabh played really well. But overall, our bowling was good too.
"On a night when one of their batsmen scored 128 runs, we didn't allow them to reach the 200-run mark and were able to restrict them to 187, which means that at moments our bowling was really good tonight," he said.
The 24-year-old pacer praised Pant's performance for the Daredevils, giving full credit to his 20-year-old compatriot. "I will give full credit to Rishabh for his innings tonight," Sharma remarked.
"We had some great and experienced bowlers in our team — there's Bhuvneshwar (Kumar), Rashid Khan, Siddharht Kaul, who have been putting excellent deliveries throughout the tournament. But Rishabh played a number of great shots tonight.
"Our bowlers executed well, but he (Rishabh) forced himself even against our good deliveries to squeeze runs out of them. It was his day tonight and that's why he was better than our bowlers. He played well. We didn't bowl bad," the Sunrisers bowler stated.
The Hyderabad franchise did bowl well, especially during the initial phase of the Delhi innings as Shakib Al Hassan nullified both Prithvi Shaw (9 off 11) and Jason Roy (11 off 13) in quick succession. later, a Bhuvneshwar Kumar delivery forced Glenn Maxwell to gift an easy catch to Alex Hales.
The other two wickets that fell to Delhi's disappointment (Shreyas Iyer and Harshal Patel) were rather self-inflicted on account of the miscommunication that ensued — with Pant on both occasions — as the players tried to run-between-the-wickets only to fail miserably.
Nevertheless, Sandeep also admitted that although the Sunrisers are having a dream run at the IPl this season, there is still room for improvement before they head into the play-offs.
"No team and no player is perfect. There are a lot of areas that we can improve in, like our fielding or our awareness and communication on the pitch. Even our bowling and batting can be improved irrespective of how well we have performed," Sharma said.