Brian Lara has replaced Tom Moody as head coach of Sunrisers Hyderabad for the 2023 IPL season. Lara was part of the SRH team management last season as a strategic advisor and batting coach, and this will be his first assignment as a head coach of a T20 team.
It is learned that Moody and Sunrisers came to a mutual agreement to part ways. Moody was recently appointed director of cricket at Desert Vipers, one of the six franchises in the ILT20, which is scheduled to begin in the UAE in January 2023.
Moody had returned to Sunrisers in 2021 as director of cricket with fellow Australian Trevor Bayliss as head coach. Once Bayliss left after a dismal 2021 season, in which Sunrisers finished last with just three wins, the franchise appointed Moody as head coach, the second time he had held the post. In his highly successful first stint, between 2013 and 2019, Moody had helped Sunrisers reach the playoffs five times and win the IPL in 2016.
Moody's second stint as head coach, however, was not successful: in 2022, Sunrisers finished eighth in the 10-team tournament, with six wins and eight defeats. In the last two seasons, Sunrisers were the worst-performing team in the IPL in terms of wins: in 28 matches, they had nine victories, 18 defeats and one tie.
Moody would have been disappointed considering Sunrisers had assembled a well-balanced squad at the auction, before which they had retained three players: their captain Kane Williamson and the Indian pair of Umran Malik and Abdul Samad. In the first half of the season, Williamson got lucky at the toss, which played a big role in Sunrisers winning five matches in a row. However, they slid down the points table just as fast with five consecutive defeats. Williamson's poor batting form coupled with injuries to two key Indian players - T Natarajan and Washington Sundar - left Sunrisers frustrated.
Those two injuries came immediately after a defeat against Gujarat Titans, which Moody said triggered "negative momentum" from which his team could never recover. "We were small margins away from being in a different position on the table and that could've easily been in the top 4," Moody said on May 22, after Sunrisers ended their season with another defeat.