Sunrisers Hyderabad lost their skipper David Warner, to the ball-tampering scandal. David Warner banned from the Indian Premier League 2018 by the BCCI along with Steve Smith, Sunrisers named Kane Williamson to led in the IPL. However, to fulfill the role of an opener that Warner would've donned along side Shikhar Dhawan, SRH decided to pick Hales, who is the first and only English player till date to score a T20I century.

England all-rounder Alex Hales, who is the only Englishman to feature in the top 10 list of the ICC T20I rankings, has 1456 in 52 T20Is, averaging 31.65 with a strike-rate 136.32. He wasn't snapped up by any of the IPL teams, going unsold in the auction earlier in the year. While fellow countrymen like Ben Stokes, Jos Buttler, Chris Woakes and Sam Billings attracted lucrative deals, there was no substantial interest for Hales.

For Islamabad United in the recently-concluded Pakistan Super League, barring a score of 46 in his opening game of the tournament, he had a lean run, unable to cross the 20-run mark.

Sunrisers Hyderabad Squad: Kane Williamson (C), Shikhar Dhawan, Alex Hales, Bhuvneshwar Kumar, Manish Pandey, Rashid Khan Arman, Wriddhiman Saha, Siddarth Kaul, Deepak Hooda, Syed Khaleel Ahmed, Sandeep Sharma, Carlos Brathwaite, Shakib Al Hasan, Yusuf Pathan, Shreevats Goswami, Mohammad Nabi, Chris Jordan, Basil Thampi, T Natarajan, Sachin Baby, Bipul Sharma, Syed Mehdi Hasan, Ricky Bhui, Tanmay Agarwal.