In the 22nd match of the IPL 2024 defending champion Chennai Super Kings will lock horns with Kolkata Knight Riders at Chepauk Stadium on Monday (April 8).

CSK is currently sitting third in the points table with 4 points while their opponent is in second position with 6 points. Chennai started the campaign with two back-to-back wins but faced a setback by losing the next two games. While the visitors seemed to be on cloud nine as they thrashed their opponents in all three matches they played.

Despite the momentum KKR got at this early phase of the season, statistics against CSK are not in the favour of the Knights. In their 28 past meetings, CSK has an overwhelming advantage of 18 to 9 while one match failed to produce any result. At Chepauk also CSK got favourable stats over KKR.

IPL 2024 CSK vs KKR: What are the Strengths of KKR this Season?

The bashing batting displays in powerplay overs helped KKR to glide through the last two matches against RCB and DC. Sunil Narine-Philip Salt's partnership at the opening and the Rinku Sharma-Andre Russel duo in the middle, are some of the reasons which helped KKR to post those humongous runs on the scoreboard.

KKR always remains a bowler-heavy team. All the regular bowlers are in form and performed well in the past matches. In the last match, the Knight-bowling unit managed to all-out DC within 166 runs.

Getting Gautam Gambhir as a mentor also bolstered the KKR’s performance this season. The transformation brought by the former KKR-skipper is quite evident in the matches they played till now.

IPL 2024 CSK vs KKR: Why can KKR lose the match?

Disappointing exhibition of Fielding: Despite the beaming presentation of the batting and bowling, fielding remains a point of concern for the Knights. They dropped a few catches in every match and leaked many runs. If this trend continues this could prove very costly against the deep batting line-up of CSK.

Injury of Key Players: The injury of Harshit Rana could be detrimental against CSK as the fast bowler bagged 5 wickets in the first two matches and also against SRH he held his nerve in the last over and helped KKR to win the last-ball thriller. His replacement Vaibhav Arora bowled very well against DC. Vice-captain of the team Nitish Rana might also miss the match.

Generally in Chepauk spinners get help, but it will be very unlikely that CSK would make a spinner-friendly pitch against the spinner-heavy Kolkata. A batting pitch could bring both teams to the same level.

The battle between these two arch-rivals may seem to be favoured towards the Yellow brigade in the past but in the recent past KKR, have the edge. It will be very difficult to predict the outcome of this nail-biting thriller.