After breaking the Indian Premier League’s highest total record for a second time this season by racking up 287 runs on Monday, Sunrisers Hyderabad are now looking to breach the 300-mark, their in-form opener Travis Head said.
Hyderabad set a new mark last month by posting 277-3 against Mumbai Indians, but bettered that by making 287-3 against Royal Challengers Bengaluru, the Pat Cummins-led side winning the match by 25 runs.
Head set the tone against Bengaluru with a fiery 102 off 41 balls, while South African Heinrich Klaasen made a breezy 67.
Photo: AP
“[Our total] needs a three in front of it, does it now?” Head said at the end of the Hyderabad innings. “We’ve got guys like Klaasen, [Abdul] Samad and Nitish [Kumar Reddy]... We’ve got some power through the middle and we want to keep just putting the foot down as much as we can. We know that’s not always guaranteed, but at the moment I think we’re setting it up really well in each game and getting to the score that we need.”
Former champions Hyderabad are now fourth in the table following their fourth win in six matches.
Bengaluru, led by South African Faf du Plessis, dropped to the bottom of the 10-team league following their sixth defeat in seven matches.
Their Australian all-rounder Glenn Maxwell, who did not play against Hyderabad, subsequently announced that he was taking a break to get his body right after his poor start to the season, which included three ducks in six innings.
“I went to Faf and the coaches after the last game and said I felt it was probably time we tried someone else,” Maxwell told reporters. “I think now is actually a good time for me to give myself a bit of a mental and physical break, get my body right. If I’m required to get in during the tournament, I can hopefully get back into a really solid mental and physical space where I can still have an impact.”
The qualifying round of the World Baseball Classic (WBC) is to be held at the Taipei Dome between Feb. 21 and 25, Major League Baseball (MLB) announced today. Taiwan’s group also includes Spain, Nicaragua and South Africa, with two of the four teams advancing onto the 2026 WBC. Taiwan, currently ranked second in the world in the World Baseball Softball Confederation rankings, are favorites to come out of the group, the MLB said in an article announcing the matchups. Last year, Taiwan finished in a five-way tie in their group with two wins and two losses, but finished last on tiebreakers after giving
North Korea’s FIFA Under-17 Women’s World Cup-winning team on Saturday received a heroes’ welcome back in the capital, Pyongyang, with hundreds of people on the streets to celebrate their success. They had defeated Spain on penalties after a 1-1 draw in the U17 World Cup final in the Dominican Republic on Nov. 3. It was the second global title in two months for secretive North Korea — largely closed off to the outside world; they also lifted the FIFA U20 Women’s World Cup in September. Officials and players’ families gathered at Pyongyang International Airport to wave flowers and North Korea flags as the
For King Faisal, a 20-year-old winger from Ghana, the invitation to move to Brazil to play soccer “was a dream.” “I believed when I came here, it would help me change the life of my family and many other people,” he said in Sao Paulo. For the past year and a half, he has been playing on the under-20s squad for Sao Paulo FC, one of South America’s most prominent clubs. He and a small number of other Africans are tearing across pitches in a country known as the biggest producer and exporter of soccer stars in the world, from Pele to Neymar. For
Coco Gauff of the US on Friday defeated top-ranked Aryna Sabalenka 7-6 (7/4), 6-3 to set up a showdown with Olympic champion Zheng Qinwen in the final of the WTA Finals, while in the doubles, Taiwan’s Chan Hao-ching was eliminated. Gauff generated six break points to Belarusian Sabalenka’s four and built on early momentum in the opening set’s tiebreak that she carried through to the second set. She is the youngest player at 20 to make the final at the WTA Finals since Denmark’s Caroline Wozniacki in 2010. Zheng earlier defeated Wimbledon champion Barbora Krejcikova of the Czech Republic 6-3, 7-5 to book
RSS