On April 16 night, at one of cricket’s most iconic grounds, two teams in top form come face to face. It should be a fascinating battle in the IPL between Kolkata Knight Riders and Rajasthan Royals at the Eden Gardens.
Royals are sitting atop the table with five wins from six games while Knight Riders, which has four wins from five, must be keenly eyeing that spot.
After crushing Lucknow Super Giants by eight wickets with plenty to spare at the same venue, the host is indeed looking formidable. RR landed in this historic metropolis after winning its last match, though it was a much closer encounter against Punjab Kings.
Sanju Samsmon’s men had won that match without two of their most experienced stars, Jos Buttler and R. Ashwin. The team’s star of the season, Riyan Parag, had a relatively quiet game too, but Shimron Hetmyer steered the side home with a 10-ball 27 not out. Such has been Royals’ batting depth.
While Parag and Samson are among the leading run-scorers, Yuzvendra Chahal has worn the purple cap for much of the season.
The wrist-spinner though has to bowl against an explosive batting line-up which has the likes of Phil Salt, fresh from his 47-ball unbeaten 89 against LSG, Andre Russell, skipper Shreyas Iyer and Sunil Narine.
Narine has also been effective with the ball. Mitchell Starc must be raring to go too, after his three-wicket haul — two of them came in the final over — on Sunday.
Teams (from):
Kolkata Knight Riders: Shreyas Iyer (c), KS Bharat, Rahmanullah Gurbaz, Rinku Singh, Angkrish Raghuvanshi, Sherfane Rutherford, Manish Pandey, Andre Russell, Nitish Rana, Venkatesh Iyer, Anukul Roy, Ramandeep Singh, Varun Chakravarthy, Sunil Narine, Vaibhav Arora, Chetan Sakariya, Harshit Rana, Suyash Sharma, Mitchell Starc, Dushmantha Chameera, Sakib Hussain and Mujeeb Ur Rahman.
Rajasthan Royals: Sanju Samson (c), Jos Buttler, Shimron Hetmyer, Yashasvi Jaiswal, Dhruv Jurel, Riyan Parag, Donovan Ferreira, Kunal Rathore, Ravichandran Ashwin, Kuldeep Sen, Navdeep Saini, Sandeep Sharma, Trent Boult, Yuzvendra Chahal, Avesh Khan, Rovman Powell, Shubham Dubey, Tom Kohler-Cadmore, Abid Mushtaq, Nandre Burger, Tanush Kotian, Keshav Maharaj.
Match starts: 7:30pm.
