Mitchell Starc is on fire once again early for Kolkata Knight Riders as he removed Sunrisers Hyderabad opener Abhishek Sharma with a peach of a delivery in the first over of the IPL 2024 final in Chennai.
After conceding 2 runs off the first four balls, Starc produced the perfect outswinger which pitched on a good length and went away from the left-handed batter.
Sharma tried to put bat to ball but got completely deceived by the swing and pace of the delivery and the ball clipped the top of off-stump.
Sharma, who has been one of the best batters in the season, was left stunned as he got bowled on 2 with Starc drawing first blood to stun SRH in the summit clash.
Notably, Starc had produced a gem in the last match between KKR and SRH when he castled Travis Head for a golden duck with the second ball of Qualifier 1 in Ahmedabad last week.
The Australian left-arm seamer, who is the costliest player in IPL history, had bagged 3 wickets to clinch the Man of the Match award against SRH last time.
This happened after SRH won the toss and elected to bat first at the MA Chidambaram Stadium. Hyderabad have left out Abdul Samad while KKR are unchanged for this game.
KKR defeated SRH twice this season in the league and Qualifier 1. The two-time champions also have an 18-9 advantage over the IPL 2016 winners in head-to-head battle.
Sunrisers Hyderabad Impact Subs: Umran Malik, Glenn Phillips, Mayank Markande, Abdul Samad, Washington Sundar
Kolkata Knight Riders Impact Subs: Anukul Roy, Manish Pandey, Nitish Rana, KS Bharat, Sherfaine Rutherford
Teams:
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
Sunrisers Hyderabad (Playing XI): Travis Head, Abhishek Sharma, Rahul Tripathi, Aiden Markram, Nitish Reddy, Heinrich Klaasen(w), Shahbaz Ahmed, Pat Cummins(c), Bhuvneshwar Kumar, Jaydev Unadkat, T Natarajan
