Toss Kolkata Knight Riders chose to bowl vs Sunrisers Hyderabad

Ajinkya Rahane, playing his 200th IPL match, won the toss for Kolkata Knight Riders and opted to bowl first. That made it six times in as many games this season that the team winning the toss has opted to bowl. The chasing teams have won all five games so far.

Rahane said he expected the pitch to stay good throughout the match. KKR went in with an unchanged side.

It was no surprise that Sunrisers Hyderabad too wanted to bowl first. They made one change, bringing in left-arm wristspinner Shivang Kumar. It needs to be seen who makes the way for him, as both Harshal Patel and Eshan Malinga were part of the Impact Player list.

Both teams are looking to open their account, having lost their opening games despite scoring 200-plus. Thursday’s match is being played on pitch No. 5, a black-soil surface where Finn Allen scored 100 not out off 33 balls against South Africa in the T20 World Cup semi-final. So expect another high-scoring game. The square boundaries are 61 and 68 metres. The straight boundary is 74 metres.

Kolkata Knight Riders 1 Sunil Narine, 2 Ajinkya Rahane (capt), 3 Cameron Green, 4 Angkrish Raghuvanshi (wk), 5 Rinku Singh, 6 Ramandeep Singh, 7 Anukul Roy, 8 Vaibhav Arora, 9 Varun Chakravarthy, 10 Blessing Muzarabani, 11 Kartik Tyagi

Impact Player options Mainsh Pandey, Finn Allen, Tejasvi Singh, Saurabh Dubey, Rovman Powell

Sunrisers Hyderabad 1 Abhishek Sharma, 2 Travis Head, 3 Ishan Kishan (capt, wk), 4 Heinrich Klaasen, 5 Nitish Kumar Reddy, 6 Aniket Verma, 7 Salil Arora, 8 Harsh Dubey, 9 Shivang Kumar, 10 David Payne, 11 Jaydev Unadkat

Impact Player options Harshal Patel, Eshan Malinga, Liam Livingstone, R Smaran, Sakib Hussain