Chennai entertain Rajasthan at the Maharashtra Cricket Association Stadium (Pune) in IPL 2018 on Friday. Both teams are coming from a defeat in their previous matches. Chennai lost to Punjab, while RR came a cropper against Kolkata. Zeenews.com believes the following three players can influence the outcome of the 17th game of the season on April 20 in a big way.
Sanju Samson (Rajasthan): Sanju Samson played a blinder of an innings in Rajasthan's match against RCB, scoring 92 not out off 45 balls. However, against KKR he could only score 7 and that impacted the outcome of the match a great deal. Rajasthan are heavily dependent on Samson this season. He appears to be their only form batsman as of now. CSK also know the threat he poses to their chances in the match. If he gets going, he is going to take the match away from them. It will be interesting to see how Dhoni and co. plan to get rid of Samson early.
MS Dhoni (Chennai): Chasing 198 to win at Mohali in their last match, CSK were very much out of the reckoning when they needed 55 runs to win in three overs with Dhoni and Ravindra Jadeja at the crease. Just then taking Punjab unawares, Dhoni hit top gear paying no heed to a troubling back injury. In the 18th over bowled by former team-mate Mohit Sharma, the ex-India captain hit a six and a four. Jadeja added to the team's cause with a six of his own off the last ball of the over. Andrew Tye then conceded 19 runs to Dhoni in an over that saw the master finisher hit him for two sixes and a four. With 17 runs needed to win in the last over, many backed CSK to take the contest. However, familiarity with Dhoni as a former CSK team-mate helped bowler Mohit a great deal as twice he bowled away from Dhoni on the off side and managed to keep the big hitter quiet. Friday throws a big opportunity for Dhoni to make amends and go one better.
Ajinkya Rahane (Rajasthan): Rajasthan captain Ajinkya Rahane looked in great touch during his 19-ball 36 against Kolkata. He even took four fours from a single Sunil Narine Over. It was a shame that he got out because after that the RR innings completely fell apart and they could only go as far as 160. They were at least 20-25 runs short and Kolkata made light work of the target. Rahane has got good starts but hasn't really been able to turn them into big scores. Today he will hope he does that and takes his team back to winning ways.
