Indian Premier League T20 Cricket - Teams Review - Part 2 - Review of DC and KKR
Hello Friends,
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I hope you are all doing fine as we head into Tuesday and getting over that weekend hangover :).
Sports has been something I like the most with Cricket and Tennis being the sports I love most.
That too, cricket is something I don't want to miss out whether it's India or some other country is playing and I have been actively watching/reading including the recent controversial match between South Africa and Pakistan where Quinton De Kock got into some controversy in that run out of Fakhar Zaman although some of the players from that match from South Africa team have already left out to play in IPL.
Indian Premier League T20 Cricket is having one or the other news either with new Corona cases or someone just joining a team or even someone pulling out because of some personal reasons.
As of today's news, we have a new Corona Positive case in Team Mumbai Indians with wicket keeping specialist Kiran More testing positive and that is the only new case among all the teams after our own Devdutt Padikkal testing positive couple of days ago.
We had a review of teams Royal Challengers Bangalore and Chennai Super Kings in yesterday's blog and here I am to review 2 more teams in the alphabetical order of the city/state they play for.
P.S: If you are hearing about Indian Premier League T20 Cricket, you got to look into this to know in detail what it is.
We got closer to IPL beginning by another day as the countdown is 3 more days to go!!!!
Here are the reviews for 2 more teams in Delhi Capitals and Kolkata Knight Riders.
Delhi Capitals:
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Delhi Capitals' best season was the recently concluded season held in Middle East country of Saudi at 3 different venues and Delhi made it to the final before losing out to Mumbai Indians.
This year, they have a new captain in Rishabh Pant with Shreyas Iyer getting injured in recently concluded T20 series against England and DC are a bunch of young cricketers including their captain.
Almost half of the Indian team players are with DC along with some of the World's best players as well.
New Players Purchased:
DC made some bold moves with purchase of Steve Smith, Tom Curran, Sam Billings, Umesh Yadav among some high profile names out of the 8 new purchases.
DC retained players Ajinkya Rahane, Prithvi Shaw, Ravichandran Ashwin, Ishant Sharma, Axar Patel, Marcus Stoinis, Shimron Hetmyer, Chris Woakes along with fast bowling duo from South Africa in Anrich Nortje and Kagiso Rabada besides their captain and wicket keeper Rishabh Pant among the bigger names.
Arrival of Steve Smith should bolster their middle order in the absence of regular skipper Shreyas Iyer and also addition of Tom Curran will give them a backup all-rounder had one of the Axar Patel or Marcus Stoinis gets injured.
Addition of Umesh Yadav may not make big difference since their fast bowling unit of Ishant Sharma, Kagiso Rabada and Anrich Nortje is one of the best in the tournament and Umesh Yadav may not get a chance unless Ishant or someone gets injured.
Their spin department is good as well with Ravichandran Ashwin is with form of his life and others like Axar Patel, Amit Mishra and Pravin Dubey can always be handy.
Overall, DC looks the team to beat even in the absence of Shreyas Iyer and other teams have their task cut out against DC.
Kolkata Knight Riders:
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Kolkata Knight Riders finished in the bottom half in the last edition with losing out to RCB from reaching the top 4 spot and they will be itching for their regular top 4 finish in this edition.
New Players Purchased:
So, what are the changes KKR did this year?
KKR has added players like Shakib Al HAssan, Harbhajan Singh, Ben Cutting, Karun Nair, Sheldon Jackson and Pawan Negi among the players they brought in.
KKR already has quality players like Eoin Morgan, Shubman Gill, Rahul Tripathi, Nitish Rana, Sunil Narine, Andre Russel, Dinesh Karthik, Pat Cummins, Kuldeep Yadav, Prasidh Krishna, Varun Chakravarthy and Lockie Ferguson among their ranks and new players will just strengthen their bowling even more.
With kuldeep Yadav out of form, they will be tempted to use Harbhajan Singh as spin partner for Varun Chakravarthy while Shakib al Hasan should be in the team in most of the matches given his all-round abilities.
The 2 times champions over dependency on Andre Russel and Sunil Narine was visible in previous edition with both of them failing miserably and hence, addition of Shakib Al Hasan will be a good move and hopefully, they will start the tournament with 2 regular openers instead of using Sunil Narine as a pinch hitter and have a proper start to give more score to their middle order batsmen like Eoin Morgan, Dinesh Karthik, Shakib Al Hasan, Andre Russel and others.
KKR will also be hoping that, Andre Russel gets atleast 50% of the form he had before the 2020 season as even with 50% form, he will dangerous than most of the players from all the teams.
We had RCB and CSK yesterday and DC and KKR today for a review and I will be happy to come back tomorrow with 2 more teams review before we close out the review by 2 days with last 2 teams getting reviewed.
That's all I have in today's blog and I hope you are just enjoying going thru these blogs and IPL is something we don't want to miss out with all that action starting from Ninth April and Maharashtra Government clearing out the matches to be played in Mumbai and that will be good news for all cricket lovers from Mumbai.
Thanks and Wishing you all Good Day :)
References:
timesnownews.com
delhicapitals.in
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Thank you for sharing your thoughts. I like the detail you provided on the teams. It brought some enlightenment to my lack of knowledge of this sport.
You are welcome @scholaris.sports, happy to know that you found this blog interesting one.
We in India, will look forward to this tournament every year and it was like a big loss for us when this thing happened outside India.
Have a good day :)
Have a good day as well. The fervor ever-present in sports is exhilarating. Every country has its popular sport with rules that evolve within its society. There are those that play the sport and those that enjoy watching the sport get played. Cricket, like soccer, is a sport embraced by multiple countries. I enjoy learning about the sport in the time to come.
Thank you @scholaris.sports :)
Yep, most people in India, follow Cricket and as you said, most like to play and there are even more like me who just enjoy watching it than playing it :)
I agree with you that Soccer is the number One sport in many countries, but Cricket is a game played in some countable countries and unlike Soccer, Cricket is a game played in 3 different formats as below:
T20 format: In this format, each side will play 20 overs and each over will have 6 balls to be bowled(I guess it's almost similar to Baseball). So, in total, 120 balls to be bowled and the match will be completed in approximately 3 hours.
One Day Cricket (ODI) format: This format will have 50 overs a side to be bowled and this format got it's name because, it takes almost one day's day time(now, this format is also being played in day-night format starting in afternoon) with match getting completed in almost 8 hours including breaks.
Test Cricket format: This is the format which will run for 5 days with each side playing twice with a stipulation of 90 overs to be bowled in a day and this is the First format which used to be played and now, ODI and T20 are the popular formats.
That's a brief info about formats of Cricket and each format has it's own charm and attraction and test cricket is considered to be the classic one :)
Happy to know about your interest to learn about Cricket sports.
Good day again to you :)
I agree that the signing of Shakib is a smart move for KKR, they are, as you say, over-reliant on several players who appear to be past their best in the form of Russell, Narine and Karthik. I think it could be a big season for Nitish Rana who is coming off the back of some good domestic form
Nicely summed up about KKR's old horses, but I feel Andre Russel will find his touch once again this year.
As for as Nitish Rana is concerned, yes, he will be an important player for them once again but what I observed is, he will be very aggressive during the initial stage of the tournament, but he loses form and gas towards the fag end of the league stage and he will be like a burden to the playing XI, hope the KKR team will take care of that and handles him well.
Super excited to bring out these reviews as well as match day details.
Good day bro :)
The pressure is on Rana to be more aggressive because the likes of Shubman Gill aren't free scorers in th PP. I'm a big fan of Shubman Gill and have been ever since I saw him play U-19s for India but he is a little one-paced for T20 cricket. KKR could probably do with a more dynamic player in the top 3 to help support Gill and Rana. Sunil Narine used to be dangerous but I think teams have worked out how to bowl against him and he doesn't have the game to adapt.
Yep, Shubman Gill is someone suited more for test cricket, but, he has that capability to adapt as he shown in some of the ODI's.
Who knows, KKR may come up with another pinch hitter or may be Rahul Tripathi may open and I always think he is best suited as an opener.
Have a good day :)