By Prakash Nair 
Hyderabad, April 13: SRH were at home. Sure, Uppal tends to be kind to them. But coming into tonight, this was the team sitting sixth on the table with one win all season, a captain in Australia getting his back scanned, a bowling attack that had been leaking runs so badly the last few weeks that their own fans had stopped expecting much, and a debutant called Praful Hinge a 24-year-old from Nagpur who had never bowled a single ball in the IPL being handed the new ball to open the bowling.
Against Rajasthan Royals, unbeaten in four, top of the table, on some kind of roll that looked impossible to stop, even the most loyal SRH supporter in the stands tonight would have told you privately that a win felt unlikely. Nobody had Praful Hinge in their plans for saving this season. As it turned out, nobody needed to
What actually happened over the next three and a half hours was something else entirely.
SRH beat RR by 57 runs. And the way they did it involved a 44-ball 91 from their stand-in captain, and a 24-year-old nobody from Nagpur who had never bowled a single ball in the IPL before tonight.
Ball One. First Over. And Then Everything Changed.
Rajasthan won the toss. Parag put SRH in to bat, a sensible call, dew in the second innings, let the target do the work, classic Uppal logic. For about forty-five seconds, it looked inspired.
Jofra Archer ran in hard, first ball of the match, it swung late, Abhishek Sharma tried to muscle it over the off side and sent a top edge ballooning to third man. Golden duck. First delivery of the game. The Uppal crowd, which had come with so much hope, went very quiet very quickly.
Head came in. Never quite found his rhythm, kept fencing at stuff outside off, and when Riyan Parag was bowling himself, which raised a few eyebrows in the stands, got him driving loosely to long-on for 18, SRH were 55 for 2, and the evening had a familiar, sinking feeling to it.
What came next was Ishan Kishan, and this is the bit that deserves to be told properly.
Kishan has had a complicated IPL 2026 so far. Taking on the captaincy without much warning, trying to hold a squad together without its leader, getting asked to bat, keep, set fields, and manage plans all of it simultaneously. He has done it without complaint, without drama. But tonight was the night where the player inside the captain came roaring out.
He hit Archer for two sixes in the third over before most people had even properly settled into their seats. He smashed Tushar Deshpande for 21 in a single over in the 11th, three fours and a six coming in a blur that had the crowd back on its feet. He took a hat-trick of boundaries off Archer in the 13th, and you could see Archer shaking his head between deliveries, which is not something you see very often. Kishan got to fifty in 30 balls, punching the air once, and then carried on like the fifty was just a checkpoint on the way to somewhere bigger.
Sandeep Sharma eventually got him a wide one outside off, Kishan tried to pull it, mistimed it, and Sandeep himself tumbled into a caught-and-bowled that nearly ended in a collision with Dhruv Jurel behind the stumps. Barely held on. Kishan walked off for 91 off 44 balls, eight fours and six sixes, and the whole ground stood up. He looked at the pitch for a moment before leaving. You got the feeling he was annoyed about the nine runs he never got.
Klaasen, as he tends to do at this specific ground, played beautifully for 40 off 26 before Deshpande held a skier at extra cover. The two of them had added 88 together and pushed SRH to a point where 200 was not just possible but expected. Nitish Kumar Reddy finished things off with 28 off 13 three sixes off one Sandeep Sharma over that the bowler would rather forget. Salil Arora hung around for an unbeaten 24.
Final total: 216 for 6. Proper score. The kind that makes a chase feel like a grind from the very first over.
The Boy From Nagpur
Here is where you need to slow down and actually take in what happened next, because it is the kind of thing that only really exists in cricket.
Praful Hinge is 24 years old. He is from Nagpur. He bowls right-arm medium-fast for Vidarbha in domestic cricket, and SRH picked him up at the IPL 2026 auction for exactly 30 lakh rupees his base price. Nobody went big for him. Nobody had a bidding war. He was a backup option, a name at the bottom of the bowling list, a young pacer with a tidy domestic record and almost no T20 experience to speak of.
He had actually been in the squad for the Punjab Kings game, but never got to bowl came in as a batting impact sub and went home without sending down a single delivery. So tonight, when Ishan Kishan handed him the ball to open the bowling against the IPL’s most in-form batting lineup, Praful Hinge had bowled precisely zero balls in the Indian Premier League. In his life.
Yashasvi Jaiswal took a single off the first delivery. Normal enough. And then Vaibhav Sooryavanshi walked in.
Let us just pause there for a second. Sooryavanshi. The 15-year-old who had 200 runs this season at a strike rate of 266. The boy who had taken on Bumrah and Hazlewood and made them both look ordinary. The Orange Cap holder. He walked out to the middle at Uppal to face a man who, 24 hours ago, most RR fans could not have told you existed.
Second ball. Hinge bowled it sharp, on a length, it climbed on Sooryavanshi quicker than expected, the top edge ballooned off the splice and the keeper gobbled it up. Golden duck. Sooryavanshi gone. The crowd made the kind of noise you usually only hear after a match-winning six.
Dhruv Jurel came in next. Fourth ball. Hinge got one to straighten just enough, Jurel tried to play it, the ball hit the inside edge and crashed into the stumps. Another duck. 1 for 2.
Lhuan-dre Pretorius making his own debut for RR tonight, replacing Hetmyer in the XI survived a dot ball, then glanced the sixth delivery to the leg side. Nitish Kumar Reddy at fine leg took the catch without fuss. Three wickets in the first over. Three ducks. Rajasthan Royals: 1 for 3.
In the history of the IPL twenty-plus years of it, thousands of matches, every kind of fast bowler you can imagine nobody had ever taken three wickets in the first over of their debut. Not once. Praful Hinge, 30 lakh, Vidarbha, first ever IPL over, did it against the table-toppers at a packed Uppal.
He was not finished either. Third over, he came back and had Riyan Parag caught at point by Abhishek Sharma for 4. Four wickets in three overs. Eighteen runs conceded. On debut.
The Hyderabad crowd was making so much noise you could barely hear the commentary.
The Brief Fight Back That Was Never Really Enough
Twenty-one for five inside two overs. Most teams just fold at that point. To their credit, the Rajasthan Royals did not completely cave.
Donovan Ferreira and Ravindra Jadeja got together and decided that going down without swinging was not an option. They batted properly not slogging, not panicking, just batting. Ferreira was particularly good, timing the ball cleanly, hitting boundaries when they were there, keeping the required rate from becoming completely laughable. They got a partnership going. It stretched towards 100. At one point in the middle overs, with those two at the crease, you started to wonder very briefly if something improbable was possible.
It was not.
The target was always too steep, the fall of five wickets in the first two overs had taken too much out of the chase. When Ferreira eventually went for 69 a proper, gutsy knock in awful circumstances whatever slim chance remained went with him. Jadeja fought to the end the way Jadeja always does. But the asking rate had moved so far beyond reach by then that the lower order never had a realistic shot.
Sakib Hussain, another youngster getting his moment, took care of Jaiswal cheaply and chipped in with a couple more wickets to keep the pressure on. SRH held their nerve and bowled RR out for 159 in 19.3 overs. Fifty-seven runs. Biggest win of SRH’s season and the night Rajasthan’s unbeaten run came to an end.
What This Actually Means
For SRH, this is not just three points. After the season they have had, the losses, the bowling problems, the questions about whether they could actually compete without Cummins tonight, was the kind of win that changes something inside a dressing room. Kishan led from the front with a captain’s innings and a captain’s presence. A debutant produced one of the most extraordinary opening spells in IPL history. The crowd was loud and alive and went home happy.
That matters. Not just for the points table though, two wins from five is better than one from five but for the belief that this group of players can actually get something done this season.
For Rajasthan Royals, a first defeat, and a reminder that no purple patch lasts forever in T20 cricket. They will be fine. They are still a brilliant team with a 15-year-old who will come back next game and probably hit someone for six sixes in an over just to prove a point.
But tonight was Hyderabad’s.
And most of all, tonight was Praful Hinge’s. A name that barely anyone outside Vidarbha cricket circles knew this morning. A 30-lakh signing who had never bowled in the IPL. A boy from Nagpur who walked onto one of cricket’s biggest stages tonight and immediately wrote himself into its history.
You spend years in cricket waiting for moments like that. Occasionally, they actually arrive.
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- Prakash Nair
- Prakash Nair
- Prakash Nair
- Prakash Nair
