Ahmedabad, May 21 (IANS): Sunrisers Hyderabad captain Pat Cummins won the toss and opted to bat first against Kolkata Knight Riders (KKR) in the Qualifier 1 of the Indian Premier League (IPL) at the Narendra Modi Stadium here on Tuesday. The winner of the encounter will directly qualify for the title clash while the loser will get another chance to play the final. SRH are playing with the same team in the high-pressure game.
"We gonna have a bat, looks like a good wicket, and expect a high-scoring game. The batting group has been amazing for us and hopefully more of the same tonight. We are playing pretty much the same eleven as the last game," Cummins said at the toss.
On the other hand, KKR have replaced Phil Salt with Rahmanullah Gurbaz.
KKR skipper Shreyas Iyer said, "I would have loved to bowl. I had a chat with the curator, and he said it's a mixed soil, let's see how it plays, hoping for a good game. Important that we keep the momentum going and stay in the present. Great achievement (finishing at the top of the table) and everyone is proud of it, we are taking one match at a time, and we need to be positive about what's going to happen here. We are going with the same team."
Playing XIs:
Kolkata Knight Riders: Rahmanullah Gurbaz (wk), Sunil Narine, Venkatesh Iyer, Shreyas Iyer (c), Rinku Singh, Andre Russell, Ramandeep Singh, Mitchell Starc, Vaibhav Arora, Harshit Rana, Varun Chakaravarthy.
Impact Substitutes: Anukul Roy, Manish Pandey, Nitish Rana, KS Bharat, Sherfaine Rutherford.
Sunrisers Hyderabad: Travis Head, Abhishek Sharma, Rahul Tripathi, Nitish Reddy, Heinrich Klaasen (wk), Abdul Samad, Shahbaz Ahmed, Pat Cummins (c), Bhuvneshwar Kumar, Vijayakanth Viyaskanth, T. Natarajan.
Impact Substitutes: Sanvir Singh, Umran Malik, Glenn Phillips, Washington Sundar, Jaydev Unadkat.