The Indian Premier League is back in Lucknow on Friday for the clash between the Lucknow Super Giants and the Mumbai Indians, two sides who have a few questions to answer this early in the IPL 2025 campaign.
Both teams have picked up a win and two defeats from their opening three matches and will be looking to level up their ledger in this match and get stuck into the season as we start to approach the halfway point in it.
Lucknow Super Giants
The Lucknow Super Giants will have been expected to run well this season when you consider the fearsome looking batting order that they have at their disposal. The big issue so far is that they haven’t been able to do anything with the ball and unless that changes you wonder if they will be able to find some consistency. It is probably no surprise that the two matches Lucknow have lost this season have been when they are trying to defend a score and the one they won was when chasing one.
They will be looking to find some consistency with the ball from here on in and there is a switch to black soil pitches for this match in an attempt to help their spinners. That will help if they can find that assistance but they won’t want it to come at the detriment of their batting efforts as the likes of Mitchell Marsh, Rishabh Pant and Nicholas Pooran in particular all prefer the ball coming onto the bat rather than having to put their own pace on the ball.
Mumbai Indians
It came as a surprise to nobody that the Mumbai Indians were slow out of the blocks this season. That seems to be a regular thing for them but they did win their last match having dropped their opening two and they will be hoping that their fortunes have turned around. This will be a good test of that though because they have an indifferent record against the Lucknow Super Giants having lost five of the six matches that they have played against them.
You would imagine a lot of that is because of the pitches in Lucknow which probably don’t suit Mumbai. They are another team who want the ball coming onto the bat and for whom their spinners probably haven’t historically been their strongest suit so Mumbai might have to do this the hard way. They have a few questions of their own to answer, not least the form of Rohit Sharma, who has no captaincy excuses for his slow start to the season.
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Key Players
There might not be a better hitter of a cricket ball than Nicholas Pooran at the minute and Lucknow will be eager to ensure that the conditions don’t detract from his seemingly natural ability to score at quicker than a 200 strike rate when it matters.
Trent Boult could be massive here. He once again took an early wicket in the last match for the Mumbai Indians, as he so often does in T20 cricket and if he can get into this Lucknow order early it would certainly help the away side.
Betting
There is a real disagreement between the two bookmakers who offer run lines on this tournament with Bet365 going 341.5 and Betway having their line up at 353.5 and it is very much the under on the latter that I’m looking at here. Runs have dried up massively since that opening round of games but even here in the first match on this ground this line wouldn’t have been threatened with the first innings only yielding 171 runs. That would probably put me off going under on the lower line but not the higher one.
Everything leading into this match suggests that we are going to be on the black soil wickets which are always more difficult for the batters with the pitches assisting the spinners and the ball not necessarily coming onto the bat too well. Mumbai have already made a couple of questionable innings this season and while Lucknow are going better with the bat, how well they will do against a decent bowling unit on a potentially trickier pitch remains to be seen. Generally this is one of the lower scoring grounds in the IPL and I’ll trust it to get back to that situation here.
Tips
Back Under 353.5 runs for a 3/10 stake at 1.85 with Betway
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