Pat Cummins won the crucial toss as Sunrisers Hyderabad won the crucial toss against Kolkata Knight Riders in the IPL 2024 final in Chennai on Sunday, May 26. KKR fielded the same playing eleven that beat SRH in the first Qualifier with Nitish Rana missing out again.
Despite batting first, Pat Cummins-led SRH named in-form spin all-rounder Shahbaz Ahmed in their playing eleven with Abdul Samad settling for the impact substitutes list. Samad is enjoying a good season in 2024 with 178 runs at a strike rate of 171.15 and might come to bat if the Sunrisers witness an early collapse.
“Looks like a good wicket, never good at reading wickets,” Pat Cummins said after winning the toss. “But this looks fine. There was no dew the other night, doesn’t seem there will be today, but who knows. We are playing a particular style, won’t work every time but when it does, it will be damaging. Good to be back here. It is a different soil, but you are asking the wrong bloke. Shahbaz comes in for Samad.”
Kolkata Knight Riders Playing XI: Rahmanullah Gurbaz (wk), Sunil Narine, Venkatesh Iyer, Shreyas Iyer (c), Rinku Singh, Andre Russell, Ramandeep Singh, Mitchell Starc, Vaibhav Arora, Harshit Rana, Varun Chakaravarthy.
Kolkata Knight Riders Impact Subs: Anukul Roy, Manish Pandey, Nitish Rana, KS Bharat, Sherfaine Rutherford.
Sunrisers Hyderabad Playing XI: Travis Head, Abhishek Sharma, Rahul Tripathi, Aiden Markram, Nitish Reddy, Heinrich Klaasen (wk), Shahbaz Ahmed, Pat Cummins (c), Bhuvneshwar Kumar, Jaydev Unadkat, T Natarajan.
Sunrisers Hyderabad Impact Subs: Umran Malik, Glenn Phillips, Mayank Markande, Abdul Samad, Washington Sundar.
More to follow…
