The dominating Chennai Super Kings are all set to take on Rajasthan Royals at Jaipur’s Sawai Mansingh Stadium on Thursday.
CSK have five won five matches out of standing at the top of the points table, while the Rajasthan Royals languish closer to the floor of the table. The Royals have just one win from their five matches, and desperately need to turn around their season.
The only team the Rajasthan Royals have defeated so far is the one below them in the standings – the winless Royal Challengers Bangalore; even in that match, RR prevailed with one ball to spare. In their most recent outing – against Kolkata Knight Riders at home, the Royals batsmen struggled to come to terms with the wicket and crawled to 139-3, which the visitors chased down in 13.5 overs.
The Royals have problems to address – a few of them, and they need to address them immediately – before the majority of their World Cup-bound overseas players pack up.
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Skipper Ajinkya Rahanewas expected to be the anchor of the team’s batting, but he has managed 124 runs in five hits – 70 of those coming in one knock against Sunrisers Hyderabad. Sanju Samson, who scored the first hundred of the season, has missed the last couple of matches because of injury. Ben Stokes has had a disappointing season with both bat and ball.
On the bowling front, the leg-spinner Shreyas Gopal is among the top wicket-takers this season, but there has been little from the rest. The Rajasthan Royals’ pace bowling attack has the poorest economy rate among all the teams; even someone as experienced as Stokes has been taken for 10.84 runs per over, while the new ball bowler Dhawal Kulkarni has conceded runs at 9.65 rpo.
TEAM
Rajasthan Royals: Ajinkya Rahane, Jos Buttler, Steve Smith, Rahul Tripathi, Ben Stokes, Prashant Chopra, K Gowtham, Shreyas Gopal, Jofra Archer, S Midhun, Dhawal Kulkarni.
Chennai Super Kings: Shane Watson, Faf du Plessis, Suresh Raina, Ambati Rayudu, Kedar Jadhav, MS Dhoni, Ravindra Jadeja, Scott Kuggeleijn, Harbhajan Singh, Deepak Chahar, Imran Tahir