Bottom and second-bottom meet at Ekana as LSG host KKR with playoff hopes already paper-thin
Sunday evening at the Bharat Ratna Shri Atal Bihari Vajpayee Ekana Cricket Stadium will not be a glamour match. It is two teams in the wrong half of the table playing a fixture that, on paper, neither side can really afford to lose, even if the maths is no longer kind to either of them.
Lucknow Super Giants are ninth on four points. Kolkata Knight Riders sit at the bottom on three. Between them they have managed three wins from fourteen matches. The IPL 2026 playoff race has effectively moved on without them and Sunday is more about who gets to spend May playing dead-rubbers with a little dignity rather than who climbs back into contention.
Pant's LSG cannot find a starting eleven that holds
LSG have lost four in a row and the problems are everywhere. Rishabh Pant has been the only batter scoring with any consistency in the middle order. Mitchell Marsh has not been the powerplay enforcer Lucknow paid for. Aiden Markram has played one good knock in seven games. Their bowling, on paper led by Mohammed Shami and Wanindu Hasaranga, has leaked runs at almost ten an over in the last three matches.
Prince Yadav, the uncapped seamer who came up through the season as Pant's go-to first-change, leads the Purple Cap race. That is essentially the season's bright note. The rest of the operation looks like a side that needs a full reset before IPL 2027.
The home record at Ekana, once Lucknow's biggest asset, has gone with everything else. They have lost their last three on this surface and the pitch, traditionally a slow one favouring the kind of attack Bishnoi leads, has been giving up fewer wickets than usual.
KKR finally won one. Now they have to back it up
Kolkata Knight Riders broke a six-match losing streak in their last outing and walked into this fixture with their first win of the season in the bag. Finn Allen and Ajinkya Rahane open the batting and have done so reasonably well at points, with Allen's strike rate the standout number across an otherwise difficult tournament for the Kiwi opener.
Varun Chakravarthy is the bowler who has carried KKR through the season. He took 3 for 14 in their last match and his 5 wickets so far make him the team's best chance of pegging back any decent start. The pitch at Ekana is the kind of surface where Varun usually does serious damage. Slow, gripping, the ball holding in the surface long enough for the mystery spinner to make decisions for the batter.
A pitch made for spin and a likely low-scoring chase
Average first-innings scores at Ekana this season have hovered between 155 and 170. The square boundaries are short but the pitch is slow enough that batters have to commit early, and the dew rarely arrives in time to bail them out. That favours bowling first if you can win the toss, but more importantly it favours teams with two genuine spinners and a death bowler who can hit the blockhole.
LSG have Hasaranga and Manimaran Siddharth. KKR have Varun and a returning Sunil Narine. On those credentials KKR probably have the slight edge. On nothing else this season do they have any edge at all. Sunday will tell us which version turns up.
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