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Sunrisers Hyderabad head coach Trevor Bayliss said it was a "difficult decision" to drop David Warner from the playing eleven but the management was forced to try out a different combination in its bid to arrest the team's slide in the ongoing IPL.
Warner was dropped from the playing eleven, a day after being stripped of captaincy. Under him, the SunRisers won just one of their six games his season. The Australian himself hasn't been in the best of form which led to Kane Williamson being handed the reins.
"It was very difficult (to drop Warner from playing XI). He's a guy who has had so much success for the team but that's the way we wanted to go; try and get a different combination working for us," Bayliss said, at the post-match conference after his side's 55-run defeat to Rajasthan Royals in Delhi on Sunday.
"Like any player who gets dropped, he (Warner) was disappointed. If you saw tonight, he was running around as 12th man doing as much as he could for the team. He has been good, talking with Kane and some of the other players, giving them advice," Bayliss added.
The World Cup-winning coach said although it will be "challenging" without a batsman of Warner's stature, he does not foresee the team having any problem under the captaincy of Kane Williamson, who has led the side before.
"Very challenging without David as a player, a new captain. I don't think there's be too much of problem as Kane has been captain of the team before in the last two or three years; he's an experienced captain, captaining New Zealand. We just didn't play very well tonight and one guy played extremely well."
Talking about the match, Bayliss said Rashid Khan was brought into the attack in the powerplay in a bid to dismiss the dangerous Jos Buttler early.
“Rashid is our best performing bowler and he had a decent record against Jos Buttler in the past, so we thought we'd bowl him fairly early to try and get Jos out before he gets going.
Obviously, a very flat wicket. And Kane decided to try and keep going to get him out. Unfortunately, it didn't work tonight that's the way the game goes sometimes,” he said.
Meanwhile, Jos Buttler who notched his maiden T20 century was delighted by his performance.
"It's certainly up there; my first hundred in T20 cricket, so I am delighted with that. I don't say I felt my most fluent all the time; have felt better at the crease at times.
"For a while now I haven't been feeling at ease in the crease, sort of searching for something, but what's been good is keeping a good mindset that every day is a new opportunity. It was nice to spend some time in the middle today and get back to my best.
Asked why he went for more conventional shots, Buttler replied: "Today, I felt like the pitch was in the lower side, as the bounce is generally in Delhi, and there wasn't much pace in the wicket. So the scoop shots and shots behind the wicket I didn't feel they would be as valuable as trying to target the straighter boundaries and back my hitting like that."
The Englishman commended the performance of the bowling unit that put up a "clinical" performance to defend 220 runs.
"It was great to have Kartik Tyagi in the line-up today. I think he's a really exciting bowler. He bowls with really good pace and he spent a lot of time with India on their tour to Australia and I'm sure he'd have learnt a lot spending time in that environment.
“It was a really good bowling performance by all the boys, Mustafizur (Rahaman) was exceptional. That was a good score to defend but they made a clinical defence of that."