Abu Dhabi: Match 35 of the Indian Premier League (IPL) 2020 has the Kolkata Knight Riders facing the high-flying Sunrisers Hyderabad at the Sheikh Zayed Stadium on Sunday (October 18).
After a kicking start to their IPL campaign, the Kolkata Knight Riders are in free-fall, having registered two consecutive losses heading into this campaign. A change in captaincy didn’t help as Eoin Morgan and co fell well short of the Mumbai Indians due to Quinton de Kock’s blitzkrieg on Friday.
The former IPL champions have eight points from eight games so far and will be looking to get back into winning ways as soon as possible. For that to happen, they will need Shubman Gill and Nitish Rana to fire on the ground, not to mention Andre Russell, who is yet to get going in IPL 2020.
Andre Russell and KKR are in for a very adamant test against the Sunrisers, who are also looking to get back into winning ways after losing their previous two fixtures in the tournament. Despite the heroics of Jonny Bairstow and Rashid Khan in IPL 2020, the Sunrisers have dearly missed the performances of Bhuvneshwar Kumar.
However, T Natarajan has alleviated the death bowling concerns to some extent. The onus is on captain David Warner, who despite having scored 284 runs in IPL 2020, has looked out of touch so far. The Orange Army will be hoping for the southpaw to come good against KKR, especially with their hopes of a playoff place on the line.
The previous IPL 2020 game between the two sides saw Shubman Gill star with the willow as KKR beat SRH by seven wickets. However, both teams have had a few changes since then and look evenly matched on paper this time around.
With both teams looking to boost their chances of playoff, we should be in for a cracking start to a Sunday in the IPL.
Predicted playing XI of Sunrisers Hyderabad :
David Warner (C), Jonny Bairstow (WK), Manish Pandey, Kane Williamson, Priyam Garg, Abhishek Sharma/Vijay Shankar, Shahbaz Nadeem, Rashid Khan, T Natarajan, Sandeep Sharma and Khaleel Ahmed
Predicted playing XI of Kolkata Knight Riders :
Rahul Tripathi, Shubman Gill, Nitish Rana, Dinesh Karthik (WK), Eoin Morgan (C), Andre Russell, Chris Green/Kuldeep Yadav, Shivam Mavi/Lockie Ferguson, Pat Cummins, Prasidh Krishna and Varun Chakravarthy.
