HY­DER­ABAD, In­dia – West In­dies all-rounder Ro­mario Shep­herd was pos­si­bly count­ing his lucky stars af­ter Sun­ris­ers Hy­der­abad won a slugfest against his side, de­fend­ing cham­pi­ons Mum­bai In­di­ans by 31 runs in a thrilling In­di­an Pre­mier League match on Wednes­day.

The 29-year-old Guyanese was the des­ig­nat­ed Im­pact Play­er for MI, but he was not called up­on to bowl af­ter they won the toss and chose to field, and they watched SRH pile up the high­est IPL to­tal ever of 277 for three in the Twen­ty20 con­test at the Ra­jiv Gand­hi In­ter­na­tion­al Sta­di­um.

The mind-bog­gling bat­ting of SRH beat the pre­vi­ous high­est to­tal in the tour­na­ment of 263 for five set by Roy­al Chal­lengers Ban­ga­lore 11 years ago.

To put things in­to per­spec­tive – Hein­rich Klaasen, whose 80 off 34 balls was the top score, was the slow­est of the SRH bats­men to reach 50, re­quir­ing 23 balls.

Travis Head, play­ing his first match, raced to the mile­stone from 18 balls in a sup­port­ing knock of 62 off 24 balls, and Ab­hishek Shar­ma got there even faster – from 16 balls – to record the fastest half-cen­tu­ry by an SRH bats­man in 63 off 23 balls.

Shep­herd was asked to bat in the chase, re­plac­ing South African pac­er Kwe­na Mapha­ka, but when he ar­rived at the crease, MI re­quired 54 from 12 balls, and there was no hope of him or the vis­i­tors script­ing a mem­o­rable come­back sto­ry – and he fin­ished not out on 15.

The re­sult meant that SRH moved up to third in the 10-team ta­ble with two points from one win and one loss in two match­es, and MI dropped to ninth with no points to show from the two match­es that they have played.

Head, who sur­vived a chance off MI cap­tain Hardik Pandya ear­ly in the in­nings, set things in mo­tion for SRH, and they reached 81 for one at the close of the Pow­er Play af­ter los­ing open­er Mayank Agar­w­al caught at mid-on off the same bowler for 11 in the fifth over.

The Aus­tralian left-han­der added 68 for the sec­ond wick­et with Shar­ma in quick time to take SRH past 100 be­fore he was caught on the point bound­ary off South Africa pac­er Ger­ald Co­et­zee in the eighth over.

Shar­ma breezed to his 50 and car­ried SRH past 150, but he was caught at deep mid-wick­et off leg-spin­ner Piyush Chawla in the 11th over.

From there, Klaasen and fel­low South African Aiden Markram, not out on 42, past­ed the MI bowl­ing, tak­ing 116 un­bro­ken off the last nine overs in a spec­tac­u­lar dis­play of six-hit­ting.

In re­ply, MI closed the Pow­er Play on 76 for two, and they were 150 for three in the 11th over, but none of their bats­men could match the fire­pow­er of SRH, al­though 523 runs were scored and 38 six­es struck across the two in­nings – both be­ing records in an IPL match and T20 crick­et over­all.

CMC