Jadeja expected to return for struggling Lions
Match facts
Gujarat Lions v Rising Pune Supergiant
Rajkot, April 14, 2017
Start time 2000 local (1430 GMT)
Head to head
Last season: Lions won both matches last season and did so by chasing targets of 164 in Rajkot and 196 in Pune.
In the news
Ravindra Jadeja joined the Lions squad on Wednesday and is expected to get his IPL 2017 campaign underway at his home ground, having missed the first two games to a finger injury. Lions, however, will continue to miss the injured Dwayne Bravo, even though he had taken part in the team's practice session on Wednesday.
Assessing MS Dhoni's waning prowess in the shortest-format of the game, former India captain Sourav Ganguly has expressed his reservations about the Pune wicketkeeper being "a good T20 player" any longer.
Lions' overseas combination is set to be revamped, with either James Faulkner or Andrew Tye making their way into the XI to beef up a bowling attack that has picked up only one wicket in two matches.
For Rising Pune, Steven Smith has recovered from an upset stomach that kept him out of the clash against Sunrisers. Manoj Tiwary, who also missed the last game following his father's death, has re-joined the squad.
The likely XIs
Rising Pune Supergiant: 1 Ajinkya Rahane, 2 Mayank Agarwal, 3 Steven Smith 4 Ben Stokes, 5 MS Dhoni (wk), 6 Manoj Tiwary, 7 Rajat Bhatia, 8 Adam Zampa, 9 Deepak Chahar, 10 Imran Tahir, 11 Ashok Dinda/Shardul Thakur
Gujarat Lions: 1 Jason Roy, 2 Brendon McCullum, 3 Suresh Raina (capt), 4 Aaron Finch, 5 Dinesh Karthik (wk), 6 Ravindra Jadeja, 7 James Faulkner, 8 Praveen Kumar, 9 Tejas Baroka/Basil Thampi, 10 Dhawal Kulkarni, 11 Shivil Kaushik
Stats that matter
- Suresh Raina, who has hit the third-highest number of sixes in the history of the IPL, has hit just two sixes off 185 balls he has faced in Rajkot. Among the 41 instances in T20 cricket where he has registered a fifty-plus score, he has failed to hit a six on only two occasions - both of them in Rajkot.
- Smith has struck only 34 runs with two fours off the 39 balls he has faced against Jadeja in the IPL. He has also fallen to Jadeja four times in eight innings. No other bowler has dismissed Smith more than twice.
- Lions have lost four out of six times in Rajkot. Additionally, while visiting batsmen have struck eight half-centuries and one hundred, Lions batsmen have managed to hit only five fifties.
- Before coming into the IPL, Dinesh Karthik had amassed 1872 runs - the second most after Cheteshwar Pujara - across all formats in the 2016-17 season in India.
- Of the 12 matches played at the Saurashtra Cricket Association Ground, the team chasing has won five of six games, scoring at an average of 52.66 per wicket. A run rate in excess of nine has been instrumental in four of those five successful chases being closed out before the 19th over.
- Despite topping the points table after the league stage, Lions had the second-worst net run-rate last year. Having lost their first two games by ten and nine wickets this season, they have the worst so far this time too.
- Lions boast the least impressive economy rates in the Powerplay and middle (overs 7-15) this season, having conceded 11.00 and 10.26 runs per over in these two phases. (They have bowled only three balls in the end overs (16-20), conceding nine runs.) Pune have struggled upfront and towards the end, but they have the second-best economy, 7.11, in the middle overs among all teams.