As IPL 2020 moves into the second half of the league stage, the fate of many teams will be decided over the next couple of weeks. Four games will be played over this weekend, and there is a chance for teams to climb the ladder in the points table. Two such teams are Sunrisers Hyderabad and Kolkata Knight Riders, who will be up against each other on Sunday at Abu Dhabi.
Both teams seem to have lost their way as they have lost two games in a row. KKR is still in a better position, with four wins from eight games, whereas SRH has only three wins in their eight games so far.
This game is very important for both teams as the winner will not only improve their chances to qualify for the playoffs, but also create a huge dent in the other team’s chances. It will be a cracking contest in the afternoon in Abu Dhabi on Sunday.
Match: 35
Day: Sunday
Date: 18th October 2020
Venue: Sheikh Zayed Cricket Stadium, Abu Dhabi, UAE
Time: 3:30 PM (IST)
Pitch and Conditions:
UAE is generally a hot place and owing to that continuous usage, the pitches are getting weary and slower with every passing match. Besides, batting here at this venue has been the most difficult out of the three in the tournament. While the batting has not been easy here, the margin of error for the bowlers has been small as well. Therefore, the bowlers have resorted to length deliveries and that has brought about decent success. For spinners, bowling slowly will be the key. This is a day game and batting second will be difficult as there will be no dew to assist the team batting second. Considering the factors stated in mind, the team batting first should feel happy if they get anything over 165 on this surface.
TOSS:
The recent trend in the tournament has been to bat first winning the toss and more often than not, that decision has resulted in success. The upcoming match is a day game and the fact that the team batting second will have to bat on a worn-out pitch and have no assistance from the dew adds to the advantage of the team batting first. Besides, no team will want to have all of their eleven players first up out in the scorching heat. For all those reasons, batting first after winning the toss will undoubtedly be the right decision here.
Head to Head Stats:
Matches Played: 18, SRH Won: 7, KKR Won: 11, NR: 0
SRH Expected Playing XI:
David Warner (C), Jonny Bairstow (wk), Manish Pandey, Kane Williamson, Priyam Garg, Vijay Shankar, Rashid Khan, Shahbaz Nadeem, Sandeep Sharma, T Natarajan, Khaleel Ahmed
KKR Expected Playing XI:
Rahul Tripathi, Shubman Gill, Nitish Rana, Eoin Morgan (C), Dinesh Karthik (wk), Andre Russell, Pat Cummins, Chris Green, Shivam Mavi, Varun Chakravarthy, Prasidh Krishna
SRH vs KKR Match Prediction:
Tough call. We make our predictions after calculating each and every aspect of the match that is why we are the best tipper of IPL. Both the teams are evenly matched, and it is difficult to pick a winner between them. At the moment it seems as if SRH might just grab those two important points against KKR. Sunrisers Hyderabad are expected to get past Kolkata Knight Riders. Despite no Bhuvneshwar Kumar, they have a better bowling line-up if compared to KKR. For more and assured free IPL betting tips keep visiting our website throughout the IPL 2020.