After successive defeats in the last two games of the Chennai leg, the Kolkata Knight Riders will look to make amends when they take on the Chennai Super Kings at the Wankhede Stadium on Wednesday. 

While the surface at the M.A. Chidambaram Stadium was slightly slow and low, the Wankhede pitch would offer more pace and bounce, making it slightly better for the batters. 

Despite the loss in the last game against RCB, the batting unit looks in good touch coming into this all-important clash. One of the areas where the team will want to improve is making sure one of the top order players bats through the innings. Most of the batsmen got decent starts in the last couple of encounters but could not convert them into a big score.

The fortunes of the side will largely depend on the starts provided by young batting sensations like Nitish Rana and Shubman Gill at the top. The duo have been consistent with the bat, and the team would look up to them for a solid foundation. 

The bowling unit would be heavily reliant on Pat Cummins and Varun Chakravarthy. The mystery spinner gave early breakthroughs against RCB in the last match and is expected to weave his magic against the Super Kings. His record against MS Dhoni, the Skipper, has anyway been impressive so far. In case KKR are looking for a change in the second spin option, we will have to wait and see if Sunil Narine is fit enought to make his way into the team. 

The wicket in Mumbai is known to assist pace bowlers, and the team management would look up to Pat Cummins to provide them with his fiery spell upfront. It will be interesting to see if young guns like Kamlesh Nagarkoti or Shivam Mavi gets a start to assist Cummins. 

Chennai Super Kings, on the other hand, are coming into this game after two comprehensive victories. Along with youngsters Deepak Chahar and Shardul Thakur, the team has a wealth of experience in the form of Ravindra Jadeja and Moeen Ali.

The duo ripped through the middle order of the Rajasthan Royals in the last game to help the side register an emphatic win. 

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A significant advantage for the boys in Yellow is the venue and the surface. The team has played all their matches at Wankhede in this edition of the IPL, and will have a better understanding of the wicket and the dew factor at the stadium. 

The two teams head into this game, with CSK having a better record of winning 14 games out of 22 matches played so far.  

 

KKR Squad list:

Shubman Gill, Nitish Rana, Tim Seifert, Rahul Tripathi, Rinku Singh, Dinesh Karthik, Eoin Morgan (c), Andre Russell, Sunil Narine, Varun CV, Kuldeep Yadav, Pat Cummins, Lockie Ferguson, Kamlesh Nagarkoti, Shivam Mavi, Sandeep Warrier, Prasidh Krishna, Shakib Al Hasan, Sheldon Jackson, Vaibhav Arora, Karun Nair, Harbhajan Singh, Ben Cutting, Venkatesh Iyer, Pawan Negi 

CSK Squad list:

Faf du Plessis, Ruturaj Gaikwad, Suresh Raina, Ambati Rayudu, N. Jagadeesan (wk), Robin Uthappa, MS Dhoni (c/wk), Ravindra Jadeja, Sam Curran, Dwayne Bravo, Karn Sharma, R. Sai Kishore, Mitchell Santner, Imran Tahir, Deepak Chahar, Shardul Thakur, Lungi Ngidi, KM Asif, Moeen Ali, K Gowtham, Cheteshwar Pujara, M Harisankar Reddy, K. Bhagath Varma, C Hari Nishanth and  Jason Behrendorff