IPL 2021: Falling out could be behind David Warner’s Sunrisers Hyderabad axing
Rumours of a rift between David Warner and Hyderabad bosses – including VVS Laxman and Muttiah Muralitharan – continue to swirl, as cricket greats hit out at the IPL dumping.
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Intrigue lingers in the wake of David Warner’s shock axing from the Sunrisers Hyderabad, with suggestions of a falling out behind the scenes.
Former Hyderabad player Dale Steyn said there was “something going on there” as commentators lined up to question the decision.
Warner was, to the surprise of the cricketing world, stripped of the captaincy and dropped from his side for the IPL franchise’s game on Sunday night.
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The move had no discernible impact on the Sunrisers’ fortunes as new captain Kane Williamson struggled with the bat and the side was soundly beaten by the Rajasthan Royals.
Warner busied himself running drinks and was keen to offer advice and support to his teammates during the match. He was last seen putting empty drink bottles into a rubbish bin on the sidelines.
Coach Trevor Bayliss noted the former captain’s positive response around the group but appeared to indicate that axing the star hamstrung the side.
“It was very challenging obviously without David as a player — but a new captain, I don’t think there’ll be too much of a problem there,” he said.
“Kane’s captained before in the last two or three years. We just didn’t play very well.”
There are indications Warner may have fallen out with the team’s coaching/ownership set-up which is led by Bayliss, Tom Moody, VVS Laxman and Muttiah Muralitharan.
Warner appeared to criticise the decision to drop Indian batsman Manish Pandey ahead of a game against the Chennai Super Kings last Friday. But he took full responsibility for the loss of that game, after he scored his slowest ever T20 half century.
In a videos released after that game, Moody, the director of coaching, noted Warner’s decision to bat first was a mistake.
Moody said that the former opener and captain had thrown himself into supporting the side after his initial disappointment over being axed.
The director of coaching said the move was “purely a decision based on combinations” and Warner had to pay the price. Bayliss said the same.
Warner has been Hyderabad’s leading player since joining in 2014, topping the tournament’s run-scoring twice and leading them to a championship.
Steyn, the former South African star, said it was understandable perhaps to take the captaincy off Warner with the franchise wallowing at the bottom of the IPL table, but he found it strange to drop him as a batsman.
“It’s strange, when you think of Sunrisers you think of two players, right now I think of Rashid Khan and I think of Warner,” he told Cricinfo.
“In the past when you think of Sunrisers you’d just think David Warner straight up.
“It’s his orange army (the fan base) so it’s very strange to not see him part of an XI. There’s something going on there, I don’t know what’s going on there.
“It’s strange to see him not in the starting XI. To give up the captaincy may be one thing, Kane is a great captain for New Zealand and he has done it many times for Sunrisers, but you would still want him in the XI. He is still such a destructive player, he’s great in the field, he’s great at giving advice and he is a phenomenal batsman.
“Sometimes these captaincy things happen, but to be completely omitted from the XI is a strange thing.”
New Zealand’s Daniel Vettori came out in support of Warner for the second day running.
“David Warner is the heart and soul of the Sunrisers, he’s been so successful for such a long time, he’s won a championship for them, he’s won an Orange Cap (tournament’s highest run scorer) because he’s such a destructive top-order batsman,” he told Cricinfo.
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“He’s never really let them down as a captain or as a batsman or as a fielder. The effort or energy he puts into every game is incredible.
“That’s the captaincy side of things, but removing him from a playing XI takes a lot to work through. You could argue that David Warner is the best overseas batsman ever to play in the IPL.
“For him to fall from that level there is obviously something, there’s a big think tank involved in Sunrisers from Tom Moody, Trevor Bayliss, VVS Laxman, Muralitharan.”
Warner abandoned as fleeing IPL stars face jail time
- Peter Lalor
Michael Slater has made it out of India, but David Warner is stuck in India after his franchise dropped him from the team and removed him from the captaincy.
It is a bitter blow for one of the IPL’s biggest stars particularly coming at a time when Australia has turned its back on citizens in India.
If Warner or any of his fellow countrymen try to come home from India before May 15 they face five years in jail. The move appears to be in response to Adam Zampa and Kane Richardson flying home Friday morning via Doha when Prime Minister Scott Morrison had mistakenly announced that route was closed.
There is no guarantee that the ban will be lifted on May 15.
Mr Morrison made it clear he has no sympathy for the cricketers, noting at his press conference they were not representing their country while playing at the IPL.
Human rights organisations and the opposition have slammed the extraordinary move.
The decision and threat of jail time has alarmed the 30 plus Australians at the IPL and many feel abandoned. Some are exploring avenues to isolate overseas at the end of the tournament with suggestions they attempt to hire a group of villas in the UAE as they fear exposure in hotels.
Slater, a commentator at the tournament, had been trying to get out for a week and eventually found his way to the Maldives where he will wait until he can return to his home country without the threat of being thrown into jail.
Umpire Paul Reiffel missed his flight out of India by a matter of minutes after the borders were closed.
Warner, who has captained the Sunrisers Hyderabad to the championship title, has been the highest run scorer in the tournament on three occasions and last season became the fastest to 5000 runs in his IPL career.
He has scored two half centuries and averaged 32 in six matches this year but his strike rate of 110 is low and his side is languishing at the bottom or the table.
Warner has been replaced as skipper by New Zealand’s Kane Williamson who filled in for him after he stood down from the position in the season following the South African scandal.
There has been the hint of tensions behind the scenes at the club whose director of cricket is Tom Moody and coach Trevor Bayliss.
After a recent loss Warner appeared frustrated by the decision to drop Manish Pandey.
“It was a harsh call in my opinion. But at the end of the day, it is a decision of the selectors to do that,” Warner said at the post-match presentation.
Daniel Vettori was stunned by the decision to axe the Australian.
“It’s staggering really, it may have been alluded to in the last little while with Warner talking about selection issues and taking so much responsibility for the loss in the last game,” the New Zealand champion said in an interview on Cricinfo.
“This is so unlike Sunrisers, particularly with David Warner who has been the heart and soul of the team for a number of years.
“His performances have been so magnificent and his captaincy has been outstanding as well and he’s led the team to a title.
🚨 Announcement 🚨 pic.twitter.com/B9tBDWwzHe
— SunRisers Hyderabad (@SunRisers) May 1, 2021
“Anyone who is not involved with the Sunrisers sits back and thinks this is a huge move, but it is a move by a franchise that sits at the bottom of the table.”
Warner is considered one of the best batsmen and skippers in the T20 game.
The franchise put out a statement about the decision on the weekend.
“Sunrisers Hyderabad would like to announce that Kane Williamson will be taking over the captaincy for tomorrow’s match and for the remainder of IPL 2021,” it said.
“The team management has also made the decision that they will be changing their overseas combination for tomorrow’s match against Rajasthan Royals.
“This decision has not come lightly as the management respects the enormous impact David Warner has had for the franchise over a number of years. As we face the remainder of the season we are sure David will continue to help us strive for success both on and off the field.
Steve Smith, who captained the Rajasthan Royals in last year’s tournament, was axed in the off season and picked up a contract for far less money with Ricky Ponting’s Delhi this year.
Grim reality of India’s COVID-19 crisis as IPL forges on
- Anand Vasu in Delhi, India
At the Feroz Shah Kotla in Delhi, the lights come on in the evening for an Indian Premier League (IPL) match while a kilometre away crematoriums struggle to keep up with the demand of bodies coming their way as a result of COVID-19 deaths.
At each IPL match, two ambulances are parked, fully stocked, one for each team, with the likely chance of never being used, grazed elbows and tweaked hamstrings being the most likely injuries on the park.
In the meantime, outside the biggest hospitals in the nation’s capital, people breathe their last, gasping for air, begging for help, desperate to be allowed in, as the pandemic strips them of their dignity, denies them a dying wish and leaves them feeling bereft of humanity.
In its 14th year, the cricket world’s richest tournament continues to make millionaires of those who can hit a ball long for 20 minutes or bamboozle batsmen with variations for four overs. But the staging of the show increasingly carries with it a significant cost.
Already, there have been several high-profile withdrawals from the tournament, including India’s Ravichandran Ashwin and Australians Andrew Tye, Adam Zampa and Kane Richardson.
Paul Reiffel, the Australian Test player turned umpire, was 10 minutes away from leaving the bio-bubble when he realised he could not make it home in time, via Doha, as Scott Morrison’s government put a block on flights between the two countries.
The departure of these players has been viewed sympathetically, both by the teams they turn out for and their fans.
The simple fact of the matter is that India does not really know what to do with the second wave of this devastating pandemic.
In the 24-hour period leading into April 29, India reported more than 350,000 positive cases. Nearly 3000 people died of COVID-19 each day in the week prior. The staggering scale of human suffering is compounded by the knowledge that his is ‘just’ the official figure. The actual toll is almost certainly massively under-reported.
A newspaper in Rajkot has decided to publish death notices of all local COVID victims. Those tributes fill eight of its 20 pages.
While the country continues to struggle with managing the humanitarian crisis — those who have lived long enough liken it to a warlike situation — the IPL has simply carried on.
The IPL broadcast subtly changed on Sunday, April 25, when it first included public service messages about masking up and maintaining social distancing, something conspicuous by its absence from coverage of earlier games in the tournament.
The way in which it was gleefully celebrating the action and glory during its nightly four-hour televised pockets, as a nation outside gasped for breath, became increasingly jarring and unsustainable.
On social media, too, tone uncomfortably lagged behind events.
Official team accounts routinely put out videos highlighting the oddities of players’ wardrobes, a recent hairstyle change for a star batsman and other behind the scenes vignettes of general bonhomie.
When mainstream media outlets were filling news bulletins with disturbing visuals of people lying on the streets outside hospitals, of individuals falling at the feet of medical officials begging for oxygen and of relatives of the dead standing in queue to cremate their loved ones, these IPL videos stood out as crass and insensitive.
The initial justification for the competition continuing was that the tournament would provide succour to those who are forced to stay indoors in the evening, on the back of varying degrees of lockdowns implemented in the country.
That feeling was shared by many. But is increasingly under strain.
“If you ask me to stay at home in normal days, I would find it hard. So the IPL helps in that sense, there’s something to watch on TV,” a friend told me. “But, today, it’s a bit different. Imagine we are in Syria and there are bombs falling all around us. Would we go out just because there was nothing fun to watch on TV?”
As the situation on the ground has grown dire, there is also a rising sense among members of the public that the IPL must consider shutting down.
“If there was a death in my neighbour’s house, I would not go and party in front of them, just because it was my birthday, right?” asked one teenager fan.
“At least I would have the sense to go far away from them before I cracked a beer and began my party.”
With death all around, there is really nowhere for the average Indian to go, and little to celebrate.
On social media, the struggle is especially focused. With government agencies unable to keep up with the demand for medicines, oxygen or hospital beds, Twitter, Facebook and Instagram have filled the gap.
There is an incessant list of demands from people waiting for essential services, and the wisdom of the crowd is proving more reliable than the resources of a government that appears to have given up.
On Wednesday, a friend in Delhi was told that he might get a refill for three cylinders of oxygen, at ridiculous black market prices, in 12 hours. The patient in question, his brother in law, did not have 12 hours left.
In Bangalore, which is scheduled to host the next round of IPL matches, a member of the Legislative Council, Prakash Rathod, demanded that resources be used where they were most needed.
“Is it necessary to continue IPL games when the country is witnessing the highest number of covid cases in the entire world?” he asked.
“The scenes of bodies being burnt in open places have caught the eye of the world.”
Rathod asked that the M Chinnaswamy Stadium, home of the Royal Challengers Bangalore, be converted into a makeshift COVID-19 treatment facility.
While some of this can be put down to politics, the bigger picture is becoming more and more difficult to ignore.
In India, if cricket is a religion, those who run the Board Of Control For Cricket in India (BCCI) are the high priests. Jay Shah, the secretary of the BCCI, is the most powerful man in the organisation, even more so than Sourav Ganguly, the former India captain, who occupies the president’s chair.
Shah draws his power equally from the secretary’s role being more hands-on, as from being the son of Amit Shah, the Home Minister of the country. Shah, a former president of the Gujarat Cricket Association (a seat also formerly occupied by Narendra Modi, the Prime Minister) is undoubtedly one of the most powerful men in the country.
Decisions made within and about cricket in India are such influenced by the nation’s most powerful forces, and while money drives the IPL, any call on its abandonment cannot be divorced from a political class who have yet to truly get a grip on the unfolding disaster.
To misquote the unforgettable Colombian novelist and journalist Gabriel Garcia Marquez, the story of IPL In The Time Of Covid, is an increasingly strained and intractable one.
There might have actually been a basis for this cricket relationship to thrive, on a cornerstone of hope, but in the current dire circumstances, the chances of anything lasting or wholesome resulting from it continuing, may be little more than wishful thinking.
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