Toss Royal Challengers Bengaluru opt to bowl vs Kolkata Knight Riders

Rajat Patidar, the Royal Challengers Bengaluru (RCB) captain, has chosen to bowl in his team’s second match in Raipur, against Kolkata Knight Riders (KKR). Rain delayed the start of the match by an hour and 15 minutes, but no overs have been lost.

Patidar suggested at the toss that bowling first was the obvious decision; RCB did this and won a thriller against Mumbai Indians in their previous game at this venue on Sunday.

Seam movement and up-and-down bounce characterised the surface for that game; this one is to be played on an adjacent strip but Patidar felt it might behave similarly.

This may have influenced their selection; they bolstered their seam attack by bringing in Jacob Duffy for the legspinner Suyash Sharma. This meant the overseas allrounder Romario Shepherd had to sit out, with Venkatesh Iyer taking his place. Devdutt Padikkal starts the game on the Impact Player bench.

KKR also brought in a seamer for a spinner. They handed a cap to the Vidarbha left-arm seamer Saurabh Dubey, who came into their squad as a replacement for the injured Akash Deep. Dubey took the place of Varun Chakravarthy, who is nursing a foot injury. Dubey starts the game on the bench.

RCB will go on top of the table, above Gujarat Titans on net run rate, if they win tonight’s game. If KKR win, they will go from eighth to seventh, and move to within two points of Punjab Kings in fourth.

Kolkata Knight Riders: 1 Finn Allen, 2 Ajinkya Rahane (capt), 3 Angkrish Raghuvanshi, 4 Cameron Green, 5 Rinku Singh, 6 Manish Pandey, 7 Rovman Powell, 8 Sunil Narine, 9 Anukul Roy, 10 Kartik Tyagi, 11 Vaibhav Arora.

Royal Challengers Bengaluru: 1 Jacob Bethell, 2 Virat Kohli, 3 Rajat Patidar (capt), 4 Jitesh Sharma (wk), 5 Krunal Pandya, 6 Tim David, 7 Venkatesh Iyer, 8 Rasikh Salam, 9 Bhuvneshwar Kumar, 10 Josh Hazlewood, 11 Jacob Duffy.