Its big game for Royal Challengers Bengaluru against the inform Kolkata Knight Riders.
RCB are up against KKR at the Chinnaswamy. Bangalore are playing their 2nd home game this season. The first game they played at Chinnaswamy against the Mumbai Indians they lost the game by a narrow margin.
Bangalore has lost all its game and that too by big margins. Virat Kohli and his men are looking way out of sorts in this years campaign. Neither Kohli has been in formi nor AB De Villiers. They have looked ominous this season and they don’t look in great touch as well.
RCB has been so much dependent on Virat Kohli and AB De Villiers and they are yet to hit the form in this IPL. Hitting the form, I mean that winning games for them. Bowling of RCB has looked way out of proportion. They look down, they don’t have combinations going, they don’t have experience apart from Chahal and the list goes on. But writing them off at the Chinnaswamy is the last thing that KKR could do.
KKR is coming back from a loss in the super over against KKR. They lost their first game of the season against Delhi Capitals. KKR has been in a good run f form in the first four games but they had a set back in the last game.
Andre Russel has been the star of the KKR side so far. He has consistently bailed KKR out of the difficult situations. He single-handedly carried them with the bat and ball with some scintillating hits and some crucial wickets in the middle overs. He has the strike rate of 248.44 with an avg of 79.50. There have been good patches going on for Nitish Rana in the tournament who held the orange cap at the initial games and has sheet anchored the role through the middle order of the KKR. Opening slot of Lynn has been a downside of the KKR team. He hasn’t been up to his potential in the first 4 games but we know what he can do with the willow in his hand.
Bowling has been a concern for both sides. They haven’t been consistent in the death overs leaking way too many runs, especially with the RCB bowlers. RCB are yet to make an impact in the powerplay by picking up wickets which they have not. Virat Kohli said that they need to find the right combination as soon as possible to start getting to winning ways which means that we can be seeing some changes in the squad.
On the other hand, KKR has been decent enough with the ball and Sunil Narine would be coming back from injury as the report suggests. Kuldeep Yadav has stepped up in the absence of Sunil Narine. Prasidh Krishna has been a key bowler of KKR with the new ball and he is from Karnataka so it will be interesting to see how he utilizes the wicket at the Chinnaswamy.
Fielding has been a so much poor from RCB they dropped as many as 4 crucial catches and if you drop catches of Rahane, Steven Smith then there is very little chance of you winning the game and there is an old saying on cricket that “Catches win Matches” and it is true.
Key Players to watch out for:
Royal Challengers Bangalore:
Virat Kohli
AB De Villiers
Marcus Stoinins.
For KKR:
Andre Russell
Dinesh Karthik
Sunil Narine
Where to watch live: Chinnaswamy Stadium, Bangalore
When: April 5, at 8:00 PM IST
On TV: Start Sports Network
Press conference:
“Obviously, we can’t shy away from saying that we are under the pump. That’s definitely the case, there is no doubt about it. We can’t sit here and say we are 0-4 and we are happy about it! But the only thing, to be honest, we are quite positive about the team we have. We have always spoken about in our dressing room the kind of team we have, we don’t deserve to have lost four games in a row.” – Parthiv Patel
“We all know what kind of team RCB has got and four games down does not mean they are down and out because we know the quality of players they have and they will bounce back for sure. I am sure they are going to come back even more hard at us. Obviously, we have to prepare it that way and play some good cricket if we want to beat them.” – Piyush Chawla
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