Hyderabad’s former captains anguished at the absence of local players in Sunrisers

Abhijit Sen Gupta The prestigious Indian Premier League cricket tournament for 2021 will soon get underway but for Hyderabad fans and players there will be little to cheer about. Because the team which represents the city, namely Sunrisers Hyderabad, will not have even a single Hyderabad based player in the side.
So in what way is this a Hyderabad team then ? Is it not a shame that no Hyderabad based player has been included ? This is the birthplace of many talented players. Two of them, Ghulam Ahmed and Mohammad Azharuddin, went on to lead the Indian team and one became a captain of Pakistan’s Test team. Namely Asif Iqbal who was born in Hyderabad and studied here but migrated to Pakistan later.
There are mainly two causes for this non-inclusion of Hyderabad players. One is the fact that Hyderabad’s players did not have the on field performances to make them automatic choices for the IPL teams. Secondly there was not adequate push to persuade the Sunrisers management to include a few names as a method of encouragement to local players.
If Arjun Tendulkar could have been inducted into the Mumbai Indians side why was the same not done for other young players in different cities ? Former players who represented the state and country are disconsolate and dejected. They feel that a golden opportunity to encourage Hyderabad youngsters has been frittered away. Two distinguished former captains of Hyderabad, namely Arshad Ayub and M.V. Narasimha Rao, both of whom also represented India in Tests, spoke to Siasat and expressed a deep sense of anguish at the selection policy that has led to this sorry state of affairs.
Narasimha Rao better known now as Bobby Rao, pointed out that there should have been a mutual agreement between the Sunrisers management and the Hyderabad Cricket Association about selection of local talent in the team. There should have been an understanding that two or three young Hyderabad players would be in the side. If not in the playing eleven, at least in the overall team.