Punjab Kings vs. Royal Challengers Bangalore: RCB to start the season on a positive note

The two unlucky teams of IPL go head to head in the third game of the Indian Premier League. Will they get their hands on the first IPL trophy this year and end their trophy drought? Both the teams will be looking to do well in the game given they got the team they wanted on paper. Two new captains, two old franchises hoping for a successful season.

Punjab Kings

PBKS just retained two players from their last year's squad which speaks for itself the level of restructuring done at that club. With KL Rahul opting to go elsewhere, Mayank Agarwal is set to lead the team with plenty of new faces and new enthusiasm. Coming to their first match, they will be without the service of Jonny Bairstow and Kagiso Rabada who are on international duty at the moment. Kings will be hoping to start on a positive note forgetting about the recent failures in the previous seasons.

Punjab Kings Predicted Lineup

Shikhar Dhawan, Mayank Agarwal (c), Bhanuka Rajapaksa, Liam Livingstone, Shahrukh Khan, Prabhsimran Singh (wk), Odean Smith, Rishi Dhawan, Rahul Chahar, Arshdeep Singh, Nathan Ellis

Royal Challengers Bangalore

RCB will again be expecting a lot from Virat Kohli who now has one less burden of managing the team on the field. With Faf being the new captain in the side, he can now fully focus on his batting abilities. They retained only three players before going to the auction and had a pretty decent auction on paper. It is to be seen how they perform on the field. They will be missing Glenn Maxwell and Josh Hazelwood in their season opener.

Royal Challengers Bangalore Predicted Lineup:

Faf du Plessis (c), Anuj Rawat, Virat Kohli, Sherfane Rutherford, Dinesh Karthik (wk), Mahipal Lomror, Shahbaz Ahmed, Wanindu Hasaranga, Harshal Patel, Mohammed Siraj, David Willey

Expert betting tips

We are expecting the team who will bowl first to win the match according to the previous matches played out in the Dr. DY Patil Sports Academy. Both the sides have a decent batting lineup and will look to exploit the bowling team and with added due factor in the second innings the pitch will become more favorable to bat on. With RCB having a better auction on paper than PBKS, we are going with RCB to win the game. We are also expecting Virat to be the most run-scorer for RCB as per his recent form

Prediction

• Royal Challengers Bangalore to win for 1.;
• Each Team To Score Over 159.5 Runs for 1.91
• Top Batsman Team 2 - Virat Kohli for 3.6