IPL 2024: It was a big courageous move to keep Heinrich Klaasen at number 3 – Aaron Finch

Former Australian skipper Aaron Finch lauded Sunrisers Hyderabad for promoting Heinrich Klaasen to number three position against Royal Challengers Bengaluru at the M.Chinnaswamy Stadium, Bengaluru on Monday.

SRH got off to a flying start with their openers – Travis Head and Abhishek Sharma – adding 108 runs for the opening alliance off just 51 balls. Thus, the platform was set for an in-form Heinrich Klaasen.

Finch hailed Travis Head for his blistering knock of 102 runs off just 41 balls and hit the ground running against RCB on a batting paradise.

The former Australian opener said RCB had a required run rate of 14 from the get-go and thus they were always under the pump.

“They had to start at 14. And if you have one bad over it goes to 16. So it was never going to be a game where you talk about batsman ship, it’s a game where you talk about who hit the most sixes and that was the difference. They were getting lucky in the first powerplay, and they needed those to be sixes and Travis Head was the difference there, he started off as well, his intent to get the ball rolling,” Finch told Star Sports.

Klaasen has been in prime form and he scored a blistering knock of 67 runs off just 31 balls with the help of two fours and seven sixes.

Finch lauded SRH’s think tank for their positive approach after a fine start from their openers.

“Then a big courageous move to keep Klaasen at number 3 and say we need to keep going, we have a deep batting line up and we are going to put the bowlers to the sword here. Because a lot of times teams think that Klaasen has so much power to the back end, let’s hold him back.

“Like Glenn Maxwell at times, you don’t want to expose him right now because if he gets out, then we’ve got to rebuild. Teams don’t think like that anymore, Dan Vettori has talked about that, play aggressive, play fearlessly and bear the consequence if it doesn’t go right. If it does go right, you don’t lose,” Finch added.

Sunrisers Hyderabad will next take on Delhi Capitals at the Arun Jaitley Stadium, Delhi on Saturday.