Good Day, its today’s blog previewing the 2019 IPL competition. If you havn’t caught the others in the series then go check them out and the other 4 teams will follow over the coming days. Today though we are going to be dissecting Kolkata Knight Riders Squad. They have been champions twice with the last time in 2014. They regularly qualify for the post season play offs and therefore must be considered one of the historic strong squads.

Batting

Well as with the other teams we look at the batting first. Particularly I look at the batting average compared to other players in this years IPL who have played in the competition previously. This isn’t the best start for Kolkata. The batting averages for their players looks pretty well average really. Only 1 player consistently scores over 30 which mean this batting line up could struggle in the competition.

Moving onto the summary of the strike rates for Kolkata compared to other players in the competition and again its a little underwhelming. The players are not bad but theres no stand out players and when you look at the other teams as we have seen they often have at least one. Its going to be interesting how this plays out in the tournament.

Things look better when we review the 6 hitting rates for all the batsmen in the IPL. Kolkata have some batsmen capable of clearing the boundary rope quite often. This shines a different light on the batting line up though surprising the strike rates are relatively low when they apparently have such prowess at 6 hitting.

Bowling

Bowling, at least looking at the wicket strike rates to start, looks rosier. All bowlers for the knight riders who have previously played in the IPL average taking wickets every 20 or less balls. This is really impressive and could mean opponent scores are kept to a minimum.

The batting average of the batsmen the bowlers take the wicket of is generally about average for all the bowlers in the competition. Therefore the bowlers take wickets at really good rates and generally able to take wickets of strong batsmen. This is a really good combination and could go somewhere to overcoming the relatively poor batting strength.

Now we move onto the other facet of bowling in twenty20 cricket. The run rate conceded look pretty good for the Knight Riders with a couple of bowlers having lower than average run rate conceded.

Overall Kolkata seem to be a team of two half’s. On paper the batting looks pretty weak possibly the weakest team we have seen so far. With low batting averages and average strike rates this could lead them to posting lower totals. However, if you have a poor batting line up then make sure you have a strong bowling attack to compensate and Kolkata look to have done that. It will be interesting if going this direction will lead to success of failure for the knight riders.