On a sweltering afternoon in Hyderabad, Sunrisers Hyderabad captain Pat Cummins won the toss and opted to bat first against Kolkata Knight Riders, setting the tone for what could be a pivotal evening for both sides’ tournament momentum.
Toss, team news and impact-player call
- Sunrisers Hyderabad chose to bat after winning the toss.
- SRH made two alterations to their XI, one of them forced: Nitish Kumar Reddy was ruled out due to illness.
- R Smaran, the Karnataka youngster, received his IPL debut and came into the lineup in place of Reddy.
- Harsh Dubey was replaced by seam-bowling allrounder Harshal Patel as SRH adjusted their bowling mix.
- Kolkata Knight Riders also reshuffled twice: Finn Allen is expected to play instead of Tim Seifert.
- Manish Pandey came in for Ramandeep Singh.
- Matheesha Pathirana missed the contest as well after sitting out KKR’s previous match against Lucknow Super Giants (LSG), though KKR’s bowling coach Tim Southee said Pathirana has been bowling well in the nets.
- Angrish Raghuvanshi will wear the wicketkeeping gloves for KKR in place of Seifert.
- SRH enter the match on a run of five consecutive wins, and another victory on Sunday would lift them to the top of the points table.
- When SRH defend their total later, Praful Hinge or Sakib Hussain is likely to be used as their Impact Player.
- For KKR’s innings, Allen is set to come off the Impact Subs bench.
SRH playing XI
1 Abhishek Sharma, 2 Travis Head, 3 Ishan Kishan, 4 Heinrich Klaasen, 5 Salil Arora (wk), 6 Aniket Verma, 7 R Smaran, 8 Pat Cummins (capt), 9 Shivang Kumar, 10 Harshal Patel, 11 Eshan Malinga
Impact bench: Harsh Dubey, Praful Hinge, Liam Livingstone, Sakib Hussain and Zeeshan Ansari.
KKR playing XI
1 Ajinkya Rahane (capt), 2 Angkrish Raghuvanshi (wk), 3 Cameron Green, 4 Rovman Powell, 5 Manish Pandey, 6 Rinku Singh, 7 Anukul Roy, 8 Sunil Narine, 9 Vaibhav Arora, 10 Kartik Tyagi, 11 Varun Chakravarthy
Impact bench: Finn Allen, Ramandeep Singh, Tejasvi Dahiya, Navdeep Saini and Tim Seifert.
