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SunRisers Hyderabad skipper Pat Cummins won the toss and elected to bat first against Kolkata Knight Riders in the Qualifier 1 of the Indian Premier League 2024 at the Narendra Modi Stadium here on Tuesday.
The Knight Riders and the Hyderabad franchise have led the entertainment aspect of the league from the front with endless fours and sixes and kept statisticians busy by reaching new highs in T20 cricket. When it is all said and done, no doubt these two teams' 2024 season will be looked upon as a harbinger of a paradigm shift in T20 batting. KKR with a total of 20 points topped the league stage with nine wins, three losses and two no results. They also finished with a net run rate of +1.428, the highest by any team in the IPL history. SRH is at the second spot, with eight wins, five losses and one no result, giving them 16 points. Both sides have posted six 200-plus totals this season, the most by any team. SRH has crossed the 250-run mark thrice, also making the highest IPL total ever, 287/3 against Royal Challengers Bengaluru (RCB) while the KKR has done it twice. "We gonna have a bat, looks like a good wicket and expect a high-scoring game. The batting group has been amazing for us and hopefully more of the same tonight. We are playing pretty much the same eleven as the last game," Cummins said after winning the toss. KKR skipper Shreyas Iyer said that finishing at the top of the table is a great achievement. "I would have loved to bowl. I had a chat with the curator and he said it's a mixed soil, let's see how it plays, hoping for a good game. Important that we keep the momentum going and stay in the present. Great achievement (finishing at the top of the table) and everyone is proud of it, we are taking one match at a time and we need to be positive about what's going to happen here. We are going with the same team," Iyer said. Sunrisers Hyderabad (Playing XI): Travis Head, Abhishek Sharma, Rahul Tripathi, Nitish Reddy, Heinrich Klaasen(w), Abdul Samad, Shahbaz Ahmed, Pat Cummins(c), Bhuvneshwar Kumar, Vijayakanth Viyaskanth, T Natarajan. Kolkata Knight Riders (Playing XI): Rahmanullah Gurbaz(w), Sunil Narine, Venkatesh Iyer, Shreyas Iyer(c), Rinku Singh, Andre Russell, Ramandeep Singh, Mitchell Starc, Vaibhav Arora, Harshit Rana, Varun Chakaravarthy. (ANI)
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