Toss Kolkata Knight Riders opt to bowl vs Delhi Capitals
It was a case of when in doubt, bowl first, for Kolkata Knight Riders (KKR) captain Ajinkya Rahane as he confessed not to know too much about the way the Delhi pitch would behave.
But having won the toss, he had a decision to make and he made the one that most captains do in the shortest format. KKR are sticking with the same team that has won their last three matches in a row which means no place for Matheesha Pathirana.
Axar Patel, the Delhi Capitals (DC) captain, has armed himself with an extra spinner at the cost of a top-order batter, Vipraj Nigam coming in for Karun Nair, to exploit what he thought was a surface that would be slow and where the ball would stop on the batters. DC had another change as well with Mukesh Kumar stepping in for left-arm quick T Natarajan. The other concern about the pitch is its actual position on the ground, leading to a smaller square boundary on one side.
KKR (8th) and DC (7th) are both in with a shot of making the playoffs but the margin of error is starting to shrink.
Kolkata Knight Riders 1 Ajinkya Rahane (capt), 2 Angkrish Raghuvanshi (wk), 3 Cameron Green, 4 Rovman Powell, 5 Manish Pandey, 6 Rinku Singh, 7 Sunil Narine, 8 Anukul Roy, 9 Kartik Tyagi, 10 Vaibhav Arora, 11 Varun Chakravarthy
KKR impact options - Finn Allen, Ramandeep Singh, Tejasvi Singh, Navdeep Saini, Tim Seifert
Delhi Capitals 1 KL Rahul (wk), 2 Pathum Nissanka, 3 Sameer Rizvi, 4 Tristan Stubbs, 5 Nitish Rana, 6 Axar Patel (capt), 7 Ashutosh Sharma, 8 Lungi Ngidi, 9 Mitchell Starc, 10 Vipraj Nigam, 11 Mukesh Kumar
DC impact options - Kuldeep Yadav, Karun Nair, Abhishek Porel, T Natarajan, David Miller