IPL 2025 | Pitch dilemma for under-pressure Punjab Kings against upbeat KKR

Mullanpur: A beleaguered Punjab Kings need to pick up pieces after being blown away by 'tornado' Abhishek Sharma as they face yet another challenging opposition in Kolkata Knight Riders, here Tuesday.

It is a rarity that a team loses after putting on board a mammoth score like 245 but Punjab Kings had to endure a hard-to-digest defeat due to Abhishek Sharma's whirlwind knock of 141 off just 55 balls in their previous match against Sunrisers Hyderabad.

A helpless Shreyas Iyer, who himself smashed a 36-ball 82, could only laugh at the end of the match after watching his bowlers torn to shreds by Abhishek's blazing blade.

The carnage unfolded in Hyderabad, where the flat Uppal track resembles a 'national highway' where no total is safe.

On Tuesday, though, Punjab will play at their home in Mullanpur where the pitch is also conducive for batters and the team management needs to decide what kind of conditions it would prefer going forward.

In the two matches at Mullanpur, 200-plus scores were managed by team batting first.

The bowling unit's confidence must have been shaken, especially of the two spinners Yuzvendra Chahal and Glenn Maxwell, who gave away 96 runs in seven overs between them.

And herein lies the dilemma.

If Punjab goes for a flat deck, there is no guarantee that the bowling unit can defend anything in the 220 range, especially when KKR have the likes of Sunil Narine, Rinku Singh, and Venkatesh Iyer in their rank.

One piece of statistics that head coach Ricky Ponting wouldn't like to look at, is Punjab bowling unit's economy rate. None of the bowlers has gone below nine runs an over.

The usually dependable Chahal has gone for 11.13 runs per over in five games with only two wickets to show. The loopy leg-breaks, bowled wide outside the off stump, aren't working for him.

On the other hand, if Iyer and Ponting asks the curator to prepare a track ready where the ball would grip and offer uneven bounce, it could well boomerang on them.

In the KKR corner is the country's most improved T20 spinner Varun Chakravarthy, who loves to bowl on these kind of surfaces and Sunil Narine, who despite being past his prime, can be more than a handful in slower conditions.

KKR is a unit which can be equally dangerous on both flatter decks and the slow spin-friendly tracks since they have all their bases covered.

Also the severe thrashing they handed the Chennai Super King at Chepauk would have done a world of good to their confidence.

The Punjab Kings batting is heavily dependent on skipper Iyer (250 runs), who has scored three fifties in five games so far.

Priyansh Arya (194 runs) has been the find of the season. Nehal Wadhera (141 runs), Prabhsimran Singh (133 runs) and finisher Shashank Singh (108 runs) also give the team a lot of solidity.

Overseas recruits need to fire

But Punjab's weak link isn't their Indian players but the two Australians -- Glenn Maxwell (34 runs) and Marcus Stoinis (59 runs), who have not contributed with the bat much so far.

The team expects a lot more from them but facing Varun Chakravarthy and Narine would be a big challenge for the duo. Even Marco Jansen (ER of 11.33) has bowled way too many loose deliveries for his comfort.

Squads: Punjab Kings: Shreyas Iyer (c), Yuzvendra Chahal, Arshdeep Singh, Marcus Stoinis, Nehal Wadhera, Glenn Maxwell, Vyshak Vijaykumar, Yash Thakur, Harpreet Brar, Vishnu Vinod, Marco Jansen, Lockie Ferguson, Josh Inglis, Xavier Bartlett, Kuldeep Sen, Pyla Avinash, Suryansh Shedge, Musheer Khan, Harnoor Pannu, Aaron Hardie, Priyansh Arya, Azmatullah Omarzai Kolkata Knight Riders: Ajinkya Rahane (c), Rinku Singh, Quinton de Kock (wk), Rahmanullah Gurbaz (wk), Angkrish Raghuvanshi, Rovman Powell, Manish Pandey, Luvnith Sisodia, Venkatesh Iyer, Anukul Roy, Moeen Ali, Ramandeep Singh, Andre Russell, Anrich Nortje, Vaibhav Arora, Mayank Markande, Spencer Johnson, Harshit Rana, Sunil Narine, Varun Chakravarthy and Chetan Sakariya.

Match starts: 7.30pm.