With six losses on the bounce in the 2019 Indian Premier League (IPL) campaign, time is fast running out for Kolkata Knight Riders to salvage their play-off hopes. On Sunday, Dinesh Karthik and his men will up against a rampant Mumbai Indians who could go top of the league standings with another win.
All throughout their campaign, KKR have been heavily reliant on star all-rounder Andre Russell to bail them out of tricky situations but that luck ran out a long time ago with the side now in a perennial slide.
Russell alone has contributed with 406 runs and eight wickets in the IPL 2019 campaign but the Windies man has called for better decision making from the rest of his team-mates ahead of the Mumbai clash.
“We have a good team,” Russell told the media on the eve of the clash.
“But having a good team and making bad decisions, I think you will always lose games. And that’s what we’ve been doing,” he added.
🔥 x 1⃣5⃣0⃣@Russell12A guarantees fireworks💥#KKRvMI #KKRHaiTaiyaar #VIVOIPL pic.twitter.com/vi2e2dFJQU
— KolkataKnightRiders (@KKRiders) April 27, 2019
Kolkata were close to bringing their losing streak to a halt in their last match against Rajasthan but failed to defend a 175-run total despite reducing the opposition to 123-6.
At pains to explain where it has all gone wrong for KKR, Russell said, “I could pinpoint a few games where if we’d just looked to bowl tighter, and bowl bowlers who would restrict the game – the right bowlers at the right time.”
“They say our batting has been struggling, but our batting hasn’t been struggling really. We get the totals that we should defend, and we should restrict teams to lesser totals and go in and get those runs.
“And we don’t really take our catches, we’ve been the worst fielding team so far. It’s plain on TV, everyone’s seeing it.”
It will be the first meeting of the season between the two sides who are slate to clash once again just a week later at Mumbai.
LIKELY XIs
Kolkata Knight Riders: Chris Lynn, Sunil Narine, Shubman Gill, Nitish Rana, Dinesh Karthik (c and wk), Andre Russell, Carlos Brathwaite, Rinku Singh, Piyush Chawla, Prithvi Raj, Prasidh Krishna
Mumbai Indians: Quinton de Kock (wk), Rohit Sharma (c), Suryakumar Yadav, Evin Lewis, Krunal Pandya, Hardik Pandya, Kieron Pollard, Anukul Roy, Rahul Chahar, Jasprit Bumrah, Lasith Malinga.
