The Deccan Chargers take on the Kolkata Knight Riders in Saturday’s evening encounter, the 48th of the DLF Indian Premier League. With only eight games to go after this one, the fight between the teams ranked second to seventh in the points table can only get stiffer.

The Chargers (5/1 at Ladbrokes to win the tournament) are fourth in the points table at this moment, and a win here could leap-frog them to the second position with a couple of games in hand. The Knight Riders have already packed their bags, and are less than a week away from boarding a flight back home; with three points from 11 games.

Deccan Chargers (4/7 at Sky Bet to beat the Knight Riders) may not be able to breathe too easy even against a relatively weak opponent. The Knight Riders have the capacity to upset a few calculations, as they showed they could against the Royal Challengers. Adam Gilchrist (3/1 at Sky Bet) will look to play as aggressively as he had in the last game, but what is more important for him is that the middle order fires.

Andrew Symonds (9/2 at Stan James to be top batsman from Deccan) has looked in ominous touch and it does seem that if there is one batsman who could get to a century, it may well be him. T.Suman (6/1 at Betfred to be top Deccan batsman) may well be batting a tad higher than his position, and it could mean that he gets pushed out of the opening slot. Rohit Sharma (4/1 at Stan James to be the top scorer) may well be gunning for the purple cap with his surprising spell of bowling on two different occasions, but it is his batting that needs to come good. And soon!

Brendon McCullum (7/2 at Ladbrokes to be top Kolkata batsman) played an inning so reminiscent of the one he had played in the first ever match of previous season’s IPL. An in-form and a consistent McCullum could just be the boost that the Knight Riders may be looking, after all the negative hype created around their team. David Hussey (9/2 at Sky Bet to be top Kolkata batsman) hasn’t been targeted by the ‘Fake IPL Player’ and his blog, and my sense is that he could be the man doing all the scoring today.

The battle for which the four foreign players will be, should also be contested well, with McCullum having already snapped up one place. Brad Hodge (7/2 at Coral to be top Kolkata batsman) had been dropped in the previous game, but the reasons weren’t really made public. He has been their best batsman, and should come back, along with David Hussey and Morne van Wyk. And this will mean that the bowling line-up will be an all-Indian one; something unforeseeable after the kind of bashing that both Ishant Sharma and Ajit Agarkar got after the previous game. Problems aplenty for the Knight Riders for sure!

Tips:
Favourites: Deccan Chargers (4/7 at Sky Bet)
Top Kolkata Knight Riders batsman: David Hussey (9/2 at Sky Bet)
Top Deccan Chargers batsman: Andrew Symonds (9/2 at Stan James)