IPL 2018: Analysing Royal Challengers Bangalore squad
This year's IPL mega-auction saw all the owners and officials of the teams come under one roof. Coming into the auction, each team had a different set of plan and had previously used their retention choices accordingly. Many players found a new home, while a few stayed back.
Royal Challengers Bangalore were under the spotlight as they were coming on the back of a poor last season.They, as expected, retained Indian skipper Virat Kohli & AB de Villiers, but threw up a surprise by retaining Sarfaraz Khan. Coming into the auction RCB wanted to address their incessant problem, their Achilles' heel, the bowling department.
They ended up building quite a formidable squad and here's how their team shaped up.
Batting
Positives: RCB have always had a strong batting line-up and this season will be no different. They have made some great buys in Brendon McCullum and Quinton de Kock. The former is one batsman who can go all out right from the word go. They've got Indian batsmen Manan Vohra and Mandeep Singh, both of whom can score at a healthy strike rate.
Wicket-keeper batsman Parthiv Patel can come in and strike a few boundaries and up the scoring rate in no time. The RCB team bats deep and this relieves the pressure off Virat Kohli and AB de Villiers.
Negatives: Having as many as five openers means that Kohli must step down the order and not open the innings like he did for the past few seasons. As a team, you would always want your best batsman to face as many balls as possible, which in RCB's case is nearly impossible with the kind of openers they have. Although they bat deep, the batsmen will be under a lot of pressure to put up good scores or chase down huge totals when both Kohli and De Villiers fail.
Star Batsman: Skipper Kohli would undoubtedly be the key player for RCB. He will be going into the IPL on the back of a successful South African tour, where he hit four centuries across formats, three of which came in the ODIs alone. His tally of 4418 runs at an average of 37.44 is second only to Suresh Raina in the list of most runs scored in the IPL overall.
If he gets going, then any score is chase-able and the team would end up on the right side of the result nine out of ten times. If he can repeat an IPL 2016-like performance, then RCB will have a great chance at clinching their maiden IPL title.
Rating: 8.5/10