Mumbai Indians, who are on a six-match winning streak, will be full of confidence as they take the field to face Rising Pune Supergiant on Monday.
Pune – on the other hand – seem to be getting their campaign back on track, having won two matches on the bounce. In fact, Steve Smith’s side are the only team to defeat Mumbai this season.
Ahead of the match, we have the latest team news, start time and date, as well as how you can watch all the action from the UAE.
DATE, TIME, VENUE INFO
Date: April 24, 2017 (Monday)
Time: 18:30 GST, 20:00 local time (IST), 14:30 GMT
Venue: Wankhede Stadium, Mumbai
WHERE TO WATCH, LIVE STREAMING INFO
TV: UAE – OSN Sports Cricket HD, India – Sony Six, Sony Six HD (English), Sony Max, Sony Max HD 3 (Hindi), UK – Sky Sports
Online streaming: hotstar.com, Hotstar app (in India only)
LIVE: Sport360.com
TEAM NEWS, SQUADS, PREDICTED XIs
MI SQUAD: Rohit Sharma, Kieron Pollard, Lasith Malinga, Hardik Pandya, Parthiv Patel, Harbhajan Singh, Ambati Rayudu, Jasprit Bumrah, Shreyas Gopal, Lendl Simmons, R Vinay Kumar, Mitchell McClenaghan, J Suchith, Siddhesh Lad, Jos Buttler, Nitish Rana, Tim Southee, Jitesh Sharma, Krunal Pandya, Deepak Punia, Nicholas Pooran, Mitchell Johnson, K Gowtham, Karn Sharma, Saurabh Tiwary, Asela Gunaratne, Kulwant Khejroliya.
Mumbai have easily been the best team in the tournament so far and they seem to have a well-settled unit.
There isn’t much news about the availability of Ambati Rayudu, but even if he has recovered from his injury, where does he fit into this line-up? He could possibly replace Parthiv Patel with Rohit Sharma opening the batting and Jos Buttler donning the wicketkeeping gloves.
PREDICTED MI XI: Patel (wk), Buttler, Rana, Rohit (c), Pollard, Krunal, Hardik, Harbhajan, McClenaghan, Johnson, Bumrah.
RPS SQUAD: MS Dhoni, Ajinkya Rahane, Steve Smith, Faf du Plessis, Ashok Dinda, Ankush Bains, Rajat Bhatia, Ankit Sharma, Ishwar Pandey, Adam Zampa, Jaskaran Singh, Baba Aparajith, Deepak Chahar, Usman Khawaja, Mayank Agarwal, Ben Stokes, Jaydev Unadkat, Rahul Chahar, Saurabh Kumar, Dan Christian, Milind Tandon, Rahul Tripathi, Manoj Tiwary, Lockie Ferguson, Shardul Thakur, Imran Tahir.
The return to form of MS Dhoni in the previous match against Sunrisers Hyderabad will come as a huge boost for Pune. With Rahul Tripathi looking good at the top of the order, their batting suddenly looks very formidable.
They will be pretty pleased with their team combination at this moment but don’t be surprised if they tweak their bowling line-up depending on the pitch.
PREDICTED RPS XI: Rahane, Tripathi, Smith (c), Dhoni (wk), Stokes, Tiwary, Christian, Sundar, Thakur, Unadkat, Tahir.
FORM
(Last five matches – with latest match first)
MI: W W W W W
RPS: W W L L L
MATCH PREDICTION
Mumbai are massive favourites going into this match and we’re predicting a win for the hosts as well.