Kolkata Knight Riders will be hoping that their openers get going when they head to the Sardar Patel Stadium in Ahmedabad today for their seventh Indian Premier League encounter.
They face a stiff opposition in Rajasthan Royals, who have set themselves up nicely for a play-off spot notching four wins from six matches.
The last time both sides met at the Sheikh Zayed Stadium, Abu Dhabi it had resulted in a tie with Rajasthan adjudged winners on better boundary count.
Kolkata have tried a clutch of openers comprising captain Gautam Gambhir, Jacques Kallis, Manish Pandey, Manvinder Bisla and lastly Robin Uthappa but no pairing has provided them a good start.
The Kallis-Gambhir pair was dumped after three games and since then they have tried three different combinations without much improvement. Gambhir’s poor run of form – 52 runs from six games –has compounded their miseries.
Uthappa was the latest to be handed the job and he justified the promotion scoring 47 in the last match against Chennai Super Kings, which they lost by 34 runs.
Coach Trevor Bayliss is banking on Uthappa to steady the ship with the captain.
“We started off with a plan in place sending Jacques to open with Gautam and we have some good youngsters in our batting line-up, so Robin was given the job of batting in the middle to lower order and getting us home," said Bayliss.
“But our weakness at this stage has been the batting at the top, the opening partnership to be precise. Robin has tremendous experience batting as an opener and hence we promoted him in the last game. He did quite well, so I guess we might persist with him.”
Watch our interview with Robin Uthappa, here: http://sport360.com/video/ipl-7/20973/kkr-star-robin-uthappa-addresses-spot-fixing-ipl
