KKR, SRH eye consolation win in final outing

Kolkata Knight Riders will have little motivation left when they take on another ousted outfit Sunrisers Hyderabad in an inconsequential IPL game here on Sunday. 

Call it irony, when KKR and SRH played their last match of the 2024 IPL, it was the grand finale where Shreyas Iyer’s team had trumped Pat Cummins’s men in a one-sided match. On Sunday, however, both sides will only have bragging rights there for the taking with at best a sixth place finish in the offing. SRH will start as favourites, having thrashed a fancied RCB by 42 runs on Friday night and will be more than game-ready, unlike KKR, which last took the field against CSK on May 7 at the Eden Gardens. 

Pat Cummins would like to finish this season on a winning note and their formidable batting line-up comprising Travis Head, Abhishek Sharma, Ishan Kishan, Aniket Verma would like to feast on a batting paradise at the Kotla. Ajinkya Rahane’s men were supposed to play RCB on May 17, the first match post resumption, but Bengaluru weather not only played spoilsport, it also ended their slim Playoff hopes.

The two teams will try to win one last time and finish on a happy note before the mandarins of both teams go back to the drawing board and take stock of what all went wrong during the season. For KKR, local curator Sujan Mukherjee’s (a small time Bengal cricketer of 1970s) obstinacy in dishing out a belter certainly didn’t help their cause. They lost crucial home games and their strike bowler Varun Chakravarthy, after a roaring international season, didn’t have a great outing by his standards.

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