Royal Challengers Bangalore’s Virat Kohli plays a shot during IPL 2018 match. (Source: PTI)
In a fight to book a spot in the Indian Premier League (IPL) Play-offs, seventh-placed Royal Challengers Bangalore face an already eliminated Delhi Daredevils on Saturday in New Delhi.
With just three wins from a total of 10 games, Virat Kohli-led side’s only chance of landing with Play-offs is by winning all their four remaining games, thus making this clash against Delhi a must-win.
In their last IPL encounter, RCB lost to table-toppers Sunrisers Hyderabad by five runs and Kohli described the loss as ‘simply not good enough’. Kohli, who is RCB’s leading run-scorer with 396 runs at 49.50, questioned the character of his team after failing to chase a modest 147.
Even though Kohli and AB de Villiers have performed decent in the campaign so far, Mandeep Singh, Quinton de Kock and Brendon McCullum need to step up. Bangalore are better with the ball with pacers Tim Southee, Umesh Yadav and Mohammad Siraj performing decently.
Delhi Daredevils, on the other hand, had another sad campaign, taking an early exit from the competition with just six matches from 11 games played. Nothing seems to work for the battered side including a new captain and Rishabh Pant magic on Thursday against Sunrisers Hyderabad that saw him become the only Indian player to score a century this season.
Delhi went down by nine wickets to Kane Williamson’s side, taking an early exit from the competition. Despite that, Delhi’s bowling coach James Hopes said that it is very important for the side to win the remaining three matches. “I think we will be discussing the names of all people in the squad in the next 24 hours. We are out but it is important that we win the remaining three games,” said Hopes. “We were just not able to win close games. We threw it away against KXIP the other day. There were other games too which we should have won.”
“We had to work with depleted bowling resources (after injury to Kagiso Rabada and Chris Morris) but that is part of the game,” he added.
Teams:
Royal Challengers Bangalore: Virat Kohli (captain), Quinton de Kock, Brendon McCullum, AB de Villiers, Sarfaraz Khan, Mandeep Singh, Chris Woakes, Washington Sundar, Umesh Yadav, Yuzvendra Chahal, Colin de Grandhomme, Moeen Ali, Pawan Negi, Mohammed Siraj, Corey Anderson, Parthiv Patel, Tim Southee.
Delhi Daredevils: Shreyas Iyer (captain), Rishabh Pant, Glenn Maxwell, Gautam Gambhir, Jason Roy, Colin Munro, Mohammed Shami, Amit Mishra, Prithvi Shaw, Rahul Tewatia, Vijay Shankar, Harshal Patel, Avesh Khan, Shahbaz Nadeem, Daniel Christian, Jayant Yadav, Gurkeerat Singh Mann, Trent Boult, Manjot Kalra, Abhishek Sharma, Sandeep Lamichhane, Naman Ojha, Sayan Ghosh, Liam Plunkett, Junior Dala.