We are done with the first 20 games of IPL 2022, post which the Kolkata Knight Riders are right at the top of the points table while five-time champions Chennai Super Kings are surprisingly the wooden spooners.
For match 21, we have Sunrisers Hyderabad taking on the Gujarat Titans at the DY Patil Stadium in Navi Mumbai, where the contest between the bat and ball has been a fair one.
Sunrisers Hyderabad come into this game on the back of a win – their first win of the season – against CSK. After restricting the opponents to a total of 154 in the first innings, they hunted down the target with more than two overs to spare. Abhishek Sharma was the Player of the Match for his knock of 75 off 50. Rahul Tripathi and Nicholas Pooran’s cameos came at a strike rate of more than 250 respectively, which helped Hyderabad wrap up the game as quickly as possible.
Gujarat Titans are on a rampage, having won all of their three games played so far. Their most recent game against Punjab went down to the wire after they chased down 190 in the last ball of the innings. Gujarat needed 12 runs to win off the last two balls. While that looked like a huge task, Rahul Tewatia hit two back to back sixes to do the impossible.
Given how Gujarat have performed so far, and how they have won even from the jaws of defeat, they are the favourites in the game against a struggling Sunrisers Hyderabad.
Predicted XI
Sunrisers Hyderabad
Abhishek Sharma, Kane Williamson (c), Rahul Tripathi, Aiden Markram, Nicholas Pooran (w), Shashank Singh, Washington Sundar, Bhuvneshwar Kumar, Marco Jansen, Umran Malik, T Natarajan
Gujarat Titans
Matthew Wade (w), Shubman Gill, Sai Sudarshan, Hardik Pandya (c), David Miller, Rahul Tewatia, Abhinav Manohar, Rashid Khan, Lockie Ferguson, Mohammed Shami, Darshan Nalkande
Image credit: IPL
