Short on form, Andre Russell batted at the nets for a good period of time on Friday before Kolkata Knight Riders’ training session got underway. Practice makes perfect?
So far, this IPL hasn’t really seen the best of Russell, who got off to decent starts in a game or two, only to bungle thereafter. In eight matches, his average reads a lowly 9.16, with a strike rate (119.56) that’s very unlike Russell.
The Knight Riders, though, have continued to trust the Jamaican, who still has an opportunity to vindicate the team’s faith in him when the Knight Riders face Punjab Kings on Saturday.
Russell would be itching to do so. He had failed to take the Knights home in Mullanpur, where the defending champions suffered the 95-all-out ignominy chasing 112 against Kings. Had Russell batted up the order in that game, he might have had a better chance of taking his side home.
According to KKR sources, the all-rounder wishes to go a little up the order to get his eye in before blazing away at the death. If Russell manages to play like the way he does, it should go a long way in solving quite a few problems that the Knights have had with their shaky batting this season.
They are drawing inspiration from their batting performance against Lucknow Super Giants, where they came perilously close to overhauling the opposition’s 238/3 before eventually finishing at 234/7.
“We’ve had a couple of bad losses, especially the last two, with the way we batted. But it was not so long ago that we chased down almost 240, so we did bat well too in between,” spinner all-rounder Moeen Ali said at the pre-match news conference on Friday.
Will the Knights bring changes in their XI for Saturday’s contest? The training sessions on Thursday and Friday hinted so, with Rovman Powell, pacer Anrich Nortje and keeper-batter Luvnith Sisodia among those going through intense practice.
Whether Quinton de Kock returns to the XI also remains to be seen.
Punjab, led by Shreyas Iyer, have roped in Mumbai spinner all-rounder Tanush Kotian as their net bowler. It was learnt that this was Shreyas’s idea so that the batters could practise against off-spin.
Pahalgam tribute
The Knights may wear black armbands on Saturday, to pay homage to the 26 people slain in the Pahalgam terror attack earlier this week. “The team has spoken to BCCI on this matter,” a team source said.
