Royal Challengers Bangalore – who have been knocked out of the race for the playoff spots – will host Kings XI Punjab at the M. Chinnaswamy Stadium on Friday.
The hosts have lost four out of their last four completed matches and will want to entertain their home crowd after a disappointment campaign so far.
Punjab, on the other hand, still have hopes of making the playoffs and they need a victory here to keep the pressure on the top four.
Ahead of the match, we have the latest team news, start time and date, as well as how you can watch all the action from the UAE.
DATE, TIME, VENUE INFO
Date: May 5, 2017 (Friday)
Time: 18:30 GST, 20:00 local time (IST), 14:30 GMT
Venue: M. Chinnaswamy Stadium, Bengaluru
WHERE TO WATCH, LIVE STREAMING INFO
TV: UAE – OSN Sports Cricket HD, India – Sony Six, Sony Six HD (English), Sony Max, Sony Max HD 3 (Hindi), UK – Sky Sports
Online streaming: hotstar.com, Hotstar app (in India only)
LIVE: Sport360.com
TEAM NEWS, SQUADS, PREDICTED XIs
10 years in the #VIVOIPL and 6 years at #RCB, here's what the crowd-favourite AB has to say about his experience in the league: #PlayBold pic.twitter.com/kqsTwSk9bZ
RCB SQUAD: Virat Kohli, Chris Gayle, AB de Villiers, Shane Watson, Yuzvendra Chahal, Harshal Patel, Mandeep Singh, Adam Milne, Sreenath Aravind, Kedar Jadhav, Stuart Binny, Samuel Badree, Travis Head, Sachin Baby, Iqbal Abdullah, Avesh Khan, Tabraiz Shamsi, Pawan Negi, Tymal Mills, Aniket Choudhary, Praveen Dubey, Billy Stanlake, Vishnu Vinod, Harpreet Singh.
The Royal Challengers have made a lot of changes throughout the season as they have simply failed to find the correct balance.
Returning to the Chinnaswamy, we could see Chris Gayle make a comeback into the playing XI.
PREDICTED RCB XI: Kohli (c), Gayle, de Villiers, Mandeep, Jadhav (wk), Binny, Negi, Milne, Badree, Aravind, Chahal.
KXIP SQUAD: David Miller, Manan Vohra, Axar Patel, Murali Vijay, Glenn Maxwell, Gurkeerat Singh Mann, Anureet Singh, Sandeep Sharma, Shaun Marsh, Wriddhiman Saha, Nikhil Naik, Mohit Sharma, Marcus Stoinis, KC Cariappa, Armaan Jaffer, Pardeep Sahu, Swapnil Singh, Hashim Amla, Eoin Morgan, Martin Guptill, Matt Henry, Darren Sammy, T Natarajan, Varun Aaron, Rahul Tewatia, Rinku Singh, Ishant Sharma.
The Kings XI are likely to carry on with their strategy of playing with four foreign batsmen.
It’ll be interesting to see where Manan Vohra bats considering we saw Martin Guptill and Hashim Amla opening in the last game.
PREDICTED KXIP XI: Amla, Guptill, Marsh, Vohra, Maxwell (c), Saha (wk), Axar, Mohit, Aaron, Sandeep, Natarajan.
.@sandeep25a loves playing Bangalore having picked up 12 wickets against them! How many more will he get tomorrow? #LivePunjabiPlayPunjabi pic.twitter.com/LsphXmx5t7
FORM
(Last five matches – with latest match first)
RCB: L L L N L
KXIP: W L W L L
MATCH PREDICTION
Unless one of RCB’s superstars produce something special, Punjab should win this game.
