The Indian Premier League continues on Tuesday when the top two in the IPL 2024 table meet at Eden Gardens as the Kolkata Knight Riders play host to the Rajasthan Royals in a clash between the form teams in the competition.
Whoever wins this match will end the day on top of the table and if that is Rajasthan they will open up a four point gap on the rest of the teams. Kolkata look in very good form though and certainly won’t roll over in this one.
Kolkata Knight Riders
The Kolkata Knight Riders are delivering a much better season than they did last term. There are a few reasons for that. The primary one is that players are playing their best positions and their two gun West Indians are both fit and showing great form. They are such key players that the others in the team only need to follow them and make sure they back them up for the Knight Riders to be competitive and so far so good on that plan.
When Kolkata are at their best they are a team who put the fear into opponents with the bat in hand and that is exactly what they have done so far this season. They know that they bat very deep so they can go hard right from the start of the innings and with two aggressive openers they are often ahead of the rate from the beginning. If there is a concern it comes with the ball but Mitchell Starc is slowly finding his groove and that is definitely no bad thing.
Rajasthan Royals
The Rajasthan Royals have been the team to beat so far in the competition with five wins from their six matches. The only time they have been beaten this term was against the Gujarat Titans where they went down off the final ball having largely controlled the majority of that match so they could easily be going into this one off the back of six straight wins. To their credit, they bounced back from that loss by beating the Punjab Kings last time out.
The batting of the Rajasthan Royals has done enough this season but it hasn’t fully exploded into life in the way that it can. This is a tournament with a lot of 200+ scores for example but they haven’t hit one yet, however they don’t need to because they have the best bowling attack in the competition on paper. That attack is picking up wickets throughout the innings and is restricting opponents so they are still in the game regardless of whether their batting catches fire or not.
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Key Players
Sunil Narine has been reborn at the Kolkata Knight Riders again with him being pushed back up to open. He is contributing heavily with the bat and in turn that is helping his bowling because teams are having to attack him rather than sit on him.
Riyan Parag has taken his game to a whole new level this season and he is now batting in the sort of position in the Rajasthan batting order that could propel him to be a dark horse to make the India squad for the World Cup later in the year.
Betting
I’m expecting a high scoring match here. This has been a high scoring tournament and that isn’t a fluke because the Impact Player rule leads to sides effectively ending up playing seven out and out batters and a finisher, especially in the second innings. We didn’t see the highest scoring game at Eden Gardens last time out but that was only because the Lucknow Super Giants fluffed their lines because the Kolkata Knight Riders chased down 162 with 26 balls left so they were scoring at over 10 an over in the run chase.
The Rajasthan Royals have a decent bowling unit but whether it can get stuck into this Kolkata batting unit on home soil I’m not convinced so I believe that if Rajasthan are going to win this match they will need to score well. They have plenty of run scorers and power hitters in their side and if you take out Mitchell Starc and to a lesser extent Sunil Narine there isn’t much to fear in this Knight Riders attack. That makes me think over 47.5 boundaries is the way to go here. The last match on this ground was 161/7 vs 162/2 which had 45 boundaries and I expect a higher scoring game than that so that in turn should lead to the extra three boundaries. The first game here had 54 boundaries so I think this line is well within reach for two power packed batting units.
Tips
Back Over 47.5 boundaries for a 3/10 stake at 1.91 with Bet365
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