Dubai: Virat Kohli and Rohit Sharma will be aiming to up their captaincy quotient and raise their respective team’s performance by a few notches when Royal Challengers Bangalore lock horns with defending champions Mumbai Indians in an IPL game, here on Sunday.
India’s outgoing T20 captain and the one who will replace him, both have endured crushing defeats. It puts them on a slippery slope as the tournament approaches its business end.
RCB are still in top four with 10 points from nine games while MI after their back-to-back defeats have slumped to sixth spot with eight points from nine games.
The fact that bulk of India’s top-order batters, who are currently under-performing, are from these two sides, sticks out like sore thumb.
Going into the World T20, Kohli, Rohit, Suryakumar Yadav and Ishan Kishan are some of the batting mainstays. Also there is Hardik Pandya, who is not being picked by Mumbai Indians as he is perhaps not 100 percent fit to carry his all-round duties which includes four overs of brisk fast-medium bowling.
But if Hardik is batting fit and still the burly and bordering on sloppy Saurabh Tiwary is preferred, then it does seem a bit baffling as the Baroda all-rounder purely as a batsman is miles ahead of the Jharkhand man.
Kohli showed some form en route his half-century against CSK at Sharjah but the overall form has been scratchy and his MI counterpart also didn’t completely look in his elements during the previous game against KKR.
The more worrying factor will be Surya’s lack of form which might be a result of lack of game time, having sat through two Tests in England. He is suddenly looking a lot rustier than usual.
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