Chennai, May 26 (UNI) In a clash between two former champions, Sunrisers Hyderabad (SRH) won the toss and decided to bat first against Kolkata Knight Riders (KKR) in the grand IPL final at the M.A.Chidambaram on Sunday night.
It is a repeat of the Qualifier-1 clash held on May 21 at Ahmedabad which KKR won by a convincing eight wicket margin.
KKR retained the same team that played in Qualifier-1, while left arm spinner and impact player Shahbaz Ahmed, who emerged as hero in the Qualifer-2 against Rajasthan Royals on Friday which SRH won by 36 runs, comes in place of Abdul Samad.
After blazing sun throughout the day, the sky turned cloudy about two hours before the contest.
But there was no threat of any major rain, even as the high humidity factor will have an impact on players.
Like the other day during Qualifier-2 on Friday, the dew is unlikely to play a part in the match.
This was for the first time KKR (2012, 2014 champs and 2021 finalist and SRH (2016 winner and 2018 finalist) are meeting each other in an IPL summit clash.
As far as the records of both the teams in the Chepauk stadium, KKR had won four of the 14 matches it has played here so far (ten losses), while SRH has won two of the 11 matches (9 losses).
Chennai is hosting the final for the third time. In 2011 CSK beat RCB by 58 runs and in 2012 KKR defeated CSK by five wickets.
Of the eight matches played here in this edition, teams that have batted first had won thrice and five teams have successfully chased the target.
Teams :
SRH :
Travis Head, Abhishek Sharma, Rahul Tripathi, Aiden Markram, Nitish Kumar Reddy,
Heinrich Klaasen (wk), Shahbaz Ahmed, Pat Cummins (capt), Bhuvneshwar Kumar,Jaydev Unadkat, T Natarajan.
Impact players : Abdul Samad, Mayank Markande, Glenn Phillips, Washington Sundar,Umran Malik.
KKR :
Sunil Narine, Rahmanullah Gurbaz (wk), Shreyas Iyer (capt), Venkatesh Iyer,
Rinku Singh, Andre Russell, Ramandeep Singh, Mitchell Starc, Vaibhav Arora, Harshit Rana, Varun Chakravarthy.
Impact Players: Anukul Roy, Manish Pandey, Nitish Rana, KS Bharat, Sherfane Rutherford.
