Toss Gujarat Titans chose to bowl vs Kolkata Knight Riders

Shubman Gill, the Gujarat Titans (GT) captain, chose to bowl first against Kolkata Knight Riders (KKR), on an Eden Gardens pitch that he expected to be “sticky” at the start before getting better to bat on.

GT, who will seal a playoffs spot if they win, named an unchanged side to the one that beat Sunrisers Hyderabad on Tuesday. That win was their fifth in a row.

KKR welcomed back Varun Chakravarthy, who had missed their last two games with a toe injury – which has been confirmed to be a small hairline fracture. There is a chance that the Sri Lanka slinger Matheesha Pathirana could play his first game of the season; he starts the game on the Impact Player bench, with only three overseas players in the starting XI. The swing bowler Vaibhav Arora, a regular in KKR’s XI, also starts on the bench.

KKR, who are playing their 100th game at Eden Gardens, have three games remaining, all at home. They are presently in eighth place, and ideally need to win all their remaining games to stand a chance of making the playoffs.

Kolkata Knight Riders: 1 Finn Allen, 2 Ajinkya Rahane (capt), 3 Cameron Green, 4 Angkrish Raghuvanshi (wk), 5 Manish Pandey, 6 Rinku Singh, 7 Sunil Narine, 8 Anukul Roy, 9 Varun Chakravarthy, 10 Saurabh Dubey, 11 Kartik Tyagi

Impact Player bench: Vaibhav Arora, Ramandeep Singh, Tejasvi Dahiya, Rovman Powell, Matheesha Pathirana.

Gujarat Titans: 1 Shubman Gill (capt), 2 B Sai Sudharsan, 3 Jos Buttler (wk), 4 Washington Sundar, 5 Jason Holder, 6 Nishant Sindhu, 7 Rashid Khan, 8 Arshad Khan, 9 Kagiso Rabada, 10 R Sai Kishore, 11 Mohammed Siraj

Impact Player bench: Rahul Tewatia, Glenn Phillips, Anuj Rawat, Prasidh Krishna, Kumar Kushagra.