Kolkata Knight Riders are having a low season and struggling in games. They have lost two matches back-to-back against the Mumbai Indians and the Sun Risers Hyderabad, and seems to have a lot of loopholes to fill in currently.
Their bowling unit has suffered a lot after the injury of Harshit Rana, Pathirana and Aaksh Deep, unavailability of Mustafizur Rehman from Bnagladesh. They did announce replacement with likes of Navdeep Saini and Saurabh Dubey but they didn’t get gametime yet. Even ther mystery spinner Varun Chalravarthy is going through a dull phase since the recent concluded T20 World Cup Campaign. Vaibhav Arora seems to also have lost the touch with no such clue and strategy to dismantle the opposition. Green who have been the costliest buy is also unable to bowl not getting permission from Cricket Australia.
Other than that their batting unit also seems vulnerable with collapses, Rahane unable to built partnerships and not better finishing coming from Rinku Singh and Ramandeep Singh. On whole the team looks falling apart.
Varun Chakravarthy and Sunil Narine both their star players are missing from the line up today as Varun has suffered from an injury in practice session while catching and Narine is sick as informed by KKR captain Ajinkya Rahane. They are replaced by power hitter Rovman Powell and bowler Navdeep Saini in the squad today.
It will be the second match of the 19th season at the Eden Gardens. KKR opened their account with a defeat to Sunrisers Hyderabad by 65 runs on 2nd April. In the previous game, KKR bowlers were sent all over the park as SRH posted 226 from 20 overs. Fans can expect another high-scoring thriller tonight between the Punjab Kings and Kolkata Knight Riders. Punjab is already in a good shape and one of the strongest and balanced team this year winning both the games. In last 5 KKR vs PBKS matches Punjab has a better record of winning 3 games and KKR only one.
Kolkata Knight Riders won the toss and elected to bat first. Ajinkya Rahane said, "The pitch looks on the drier side and that he wants to put up runs on the board. Preparation-wise, it has been fantastic, and he stresses the importance of winning the big moments."
KKR Playing XI : Finn Allen, Ajinkya Rahane (c), Cameron Green, Angkrish Raghuvanshi (wk), Rovman Powell, Rinku Singh, Ramandeep Singh, Anukul Roy, Navdeep Saini, Vaibhav Arora, Kartik Tyagi.
Impact Players : Manish Pandey, Tejasvi Singh, Rahul Tripathi, Saurabh Dubey, Blessing Muzarabani
PBKS Playing XI : Prabhsimran Singh, Cooper Connolly, Shreyas Iyer (c), Nehal Wadhera, Marcus Stoinis, Shashank Singh, Marco Jansen, Arshdeep Singh, Vyshak Vijaykumar, Xavier Bartlett, Yuzvendra Chahal.
Impact Players : Priyansh Arya, Suryansh Shedge, Vishnu Vinod, Pravin Dubey, Harpreet Brar
