The VIVO IPL 2017 season began with a clash between Sunrisers Hyderabad and Royal Challengers Bangalore. The two teams will come up against each other to kick off the second-half of the regular league season, though this time RCB will play hosts.

RCB will be hurting from their embarrassing defeat to the Kolkata Knight Riders on Sunday night. Virat Kohli’s bowlers came back brilliantly to bundle out KKR for 131, but in an astonishing second half, RCB themselves were bundled out for 49 – the lowest total posted in the IPL – with not one batsman getting past single figures. Skipper Kohli was at a loss for words when asked to explain the debacle, but one can expect some blunt words would have been spoken in the dressing room. RCB currently sit at the floor of the VIVO IPL 2017 standings and can barely afford another loss if they are to stay in the race for the Playoffs; they have two wins from seven matches, and given how closely teams are packed, RCB need to pick themselves up and start piling on the wins from here on.

Sunrisers Hyderabad, despite their last-ball defeat to Rising Pune Supergiant, are fairly comfortably placed in the standings with four wins from half their league matches. The team has almost all bases covered; the captain David Warner has not been at his destructive best yet, but he does the grind and scores runs, while there have been several other contributors with the bat. The bowling attack has been good too, though the team will be a tad disappointed with the result in the previous match. The one area that SRH will want to improve upon is their away record; they have played three matches on the road this season and are still winless.

[Courtesy: Internet]