In sultry Hyderabad heat, Royals' inexperienced skipper Riyan Parag committed a blunder by opting to bowl on the flattest deck on offer in IPL. The result was inevitable with Travis Head taking the Royals attack to cleaners with 67 off 31 balls and then Kishan blazed in an unfamiliar orange jersey with an audacious 106 not out off 47 balls to beef up the SRH total. Head and Kishan hit 20 fours and nine sixes between them. SRH picked up from where they left the last season and could have bettered their own and IPL's best ever total (287/3) but two wickets fell in the final over

Such was the dominance of Head during the front 10 and Kishan at the back-10 that Abhishek Sharma (24 off 11 balls) and fit-again Nitish Reddy's (30 off 15 balls) efforts were completely overshadowed. Heinrich Klaasen (34 off 14 balls) got a tailor-made situation to clobber the clueless Royals bowlers towards the end

Kishan, one of the core players in Mumbai Indians in the past few years, had a rough 2024 as he lost his central contract for ignoring domestic cricket for the cash-rich league and MI also didn't retain him

The diminutive Patna man has comeback with a renewed vigour and packed a mean punch in his 'debut game' for the new franchise

Playing seven games on such a belter, Kishan will make a serious case for himself to make a comeback to national side even though T20 team bears a settled look. The pitch had nothing for the bowlers and with little margin of error, the balls kept sailing into the stands with monotonic regularity

(With PTI inputs)