‘Instead of being conservative, we’ll try to be more aggressive’: Cummins on handling playoffs pressure

SRH is the only team to win the trophy coming from the Eliminator in the playoffs during their title run in 2016

New Delhi: Sunrisers Hyderabad skipper Pat Cummins shared his thoughts on handling the pressure of the playoffs and needing to win three games to reclaim the title, stating that the team, “instead of being more conservative”, will try to be “even more aggressive.”

SRH, who remain the only team to win the trophy coming from the Eliminator in the playoffs during their title run in 2016, will lock horns with Rajasthan Royals in the Eliminator on Wednesday evening at the New International Cricket Stadium in New Chandigarh.

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“I think you want to keep a lot of things similar to what got you into the finals. But there’s also a bit more pressure, a few more nerves, so you want to acknowledge that. I always like to think, ‘How are you going to look back on that game with no regrets?’ So, that’s always kind of my mentality going into a final.

“Instead of being more conservative, try and be even more aggressive. We have got to win three in a row to win it. We’ve won more than that throughout the season. We won five in a row at one stage, so it’s possible. These are teams that we know quite well. So, yeah, it’s not going to be easy, but I feel like we can do it,” Cummins told JioStar.

“It’s always a balance of, as a bowler, understanding what you do well and how you’re going to bowl to your strengths. But when there are probably one or two players in every lineup who can take the game away from the opposition, you do spend a little bit longer working on a Plan B or Plan C. So, yeah, we’ll plan for him. Even though he got a hundred against us last time, I thought there were times when we actually bowled quite well to him and kept him quiet. At other times, he got away from us. So, we’ll learn from that,” he added.

While SRH have completed a league double over RR season, Cummins gave his take on whether beating RR twice in league phase would hold any relevance heading into the Eliminator.

“You’re obviously starting from scratch again, but you do take learnings from previous games. We’ve played them twice. We’ve had a good look at a lot of their players. A lot of our guys can look back at those games where they’ve had success and lean on that heading into the finals. So, it’s always nice coming up against a team that you’ve had some success against,” said Cummins.

Speaking on taking learnings from the previous fixture for bowling plans to Vaibhav Suryavanshi, who has been RR’s top run-scorer in IPL 2026 so far, accumulating 583 runs in 14 matches at an average of 41.64 and a strike rate of 232.27.

“It’s always a balance of, as a bowler, understanding what you do well and how you’re going to bowl to your strengths. But when there are probably one or two players in every lineup who can take the game away from the opposition, you do spend a little bit longer working on a Plan B or Plan C.

“So, yeah, we’ll plan for him. Even though he got a hundred against us last time, I thought there were times when we actually bowled quite well to him and kept him quiet. At other times, he got away from us. So, we’ll learn from that,” the SRH skipper stated.