Harry Brook of England and SunRisers Hyderabad has revealed why head coach Brian Lara asked him to open the inning following a couple of low scores in the middle order. Brook added that the West Indian icon urged him to bat at the top due to his good start to his Test career.
In his first two appearances, the 24-year-old batted in the middle order and scored only 16 runs. However, in only his second innings at the top of the order against the Kolkata Knight Riders at Eden Gardens, he smashed a century. Brook, on the other hand, has only one double-figure score since that hundred.
The Yorkshire hitter told ESPN about the conversation he had with Lara:
“He told me, ‘You’re a Test player’. He knew that I could face the swinging ball and adapt to it. So he sent me up top. I’ve never really done it before, and in my second game I got a hundred.”
Brook claimed that he decided to try hitting the ball hard against KKR because he wanted to bat through the innings. Aiden Markram and Abhishek Sharma were also credited by the youngster for their aggressive batting, saying:
“I just thought, ‘Sod it, I’m going to try and hit the ball hard.’ That came off to start with. Their spinners are potentially the best in the competition, so I tried to get off strike to them and thankfully, we had a couple of good partnerships through the middle. We had a chat at one of the timeouts, where I was like, ‘I’ll try to bat through so that anybody else coming in can be positive, and then I’ll look to try to take the seamers down.’ Markram and Abhishek really helped me by playing positively, and it all kind of fell into place.”
As the SunRisers set a daunting 229-run target for the hosts, the Englishman shared 72-run partnerships with both Markram and Sharma. They eventually won by a score of 23 runs.
With only 163 runs in eight matches, the 24-year-old hopes for a better second half of IPL 2023 and stated:
“I’d have liked to have done a little bit better. Obviously, I had that one good innings, but I haven’t really done anything else. That has been frustrating, but hopefully I can turn that around in the second half of the competition.”
On Thursday, May 4, SRH will play KKR in Hyderabad.
