The Mumbai Indians will play the Kolkata Knight Riders in the Brabourne Stadium. Going into the game, so far, Mumbai has won two out of two games and are clearly looking like the team in form whereas Kolkata won their first two games but lost their third match.

The good thing about the Mumbai Indians’ performance in the first two matches so far has been the fact that they have relied more on their Indian players to dish out the performances. So, Sachin Tendulkar has scored runs in both the games, as have the most unlikely pair of Saurabh Tiwary and Ambati Rayadu. Apart from the batsmen, even the bowlers have been dependent on the Indian players like Zaheer Khan and Harbhajan Singh, with outside support from the likes of Dwayne Bravo and Kieron Pollard.

What has been good is that the foreign players like Dwayne Bravo and Kieron Pollard are getting their time to ease into the squads and hence, when the opportunity arrives, they will be good to wind up and smash the really big ones. With Tiwary and Rayadu in the form that they are in, it will not be long before that happens that one of these two West Indian batsmen will be asked to bat up the order to take the load off the Indian pair and could be expected to deliver.

As compared to that, the Kolkata Knight Riders had an excellent start to the tournament, and smacked away the defending champions and the runner-up from last time to win two in a row. They did mess up in the game against Chennai but the captain Sourav Ganguly will know that he will have to do something with the bat himself rather than blame the rest of the batsmen.

The quandary that will be facing Sourav Ganguly is that Chris Gayle is in India and ready to play but which of the foreign players could be replace. Brad Hodge was the preferred opener and he has a fifty and a couple of failures, whereas Angelo Mathews has had an excellent couple of games. As compared to that, a fast bowler out of Langeveldt and Shane Bond is a definite requirement, which leaves out only Owais Shah to do the rest.

One gets the sense that Gayle, with his ability to bowl off-spin as well, will get into the side, and one of Hodge or Owais Shah will go out. The rest of them remain the same.

Tag :- Dwayne Bravo   Kieron Pollard   Kolkata Knight Riders   Mumbai Indians   Sachin Tendulkar   Sourav Ganguly