Pune: Royal Challengers Bangalore will be striving to keep their IPL hopes alive when they meet an equally inconsistent Rising Pune Supergiant in an Indian Premier League encounter, on Saturday.
Current India captain Virat Kohli’s team have lost six out of their nine games and are second-last on the table with five points in their kitty.
For RCB, a defeat will mean that the tournament will be as good as over. They still have slim hopes if they can win all their remaining five games and hope for some favourable results from the other games.
Rising Pune Supergiant are slightly better off with eight points from eight games with four wins in their kitty. But even RPS has been inconsistent at one level. They have been good on certain days and very ordinary on other days.
Skipper Steve Smith will like to address that issue when they face RCB, who are already down in the dumps after a string of defeats.
However, T20 is a format where things change so quickly, RCB with their world-class batting line-up cannot be ruled out completely.
Kohli, Chris Gayle and AB de Villiers can destroy any bowling attack on a given day and RPS save Ben Sto-kes (six wickets) and Imran Tahir (10 wickets), don’t have much to write home about. The Indian pacers like Jaydev Unadkat and Shardul Thakur has down well in patches.
But the Pune outfit will be facing RCB when their confidence has hit nadir. The team is not doing well and perhaps it is the best time for RPS bowlers to put Kohli and Company into some sort of trouble.
In the batting department, the find of the season for Pune has been local boy Rahul Tripathi, who has scored 216 runs in six games.
