IPL 2018: Biggest strength of each franchise

#7 Royal Challengers Bangalore - Squad depth

Skipper Virat Kohli has a plethora of options to chose from this year

The Royal Challengers, over the years, have known to be overly reliant on their star-studded batting lineup. In the previous auctions, they splurged a large chunk of their funds on one star player (Dinesh Karthik, Yuvraj Singh and Shane Watson). This strategy backfired for the Royal Challengers as these star players failed to live up to their potential.

This year, the franchisee from Bangalore have played smart at the auction. Rather than splurging on one star player, they have spent their money wisely to build a good-looking overall squad. All their positions have replacements and they can tinker with their squads at will. They can use the "horses for courses" approach to games depending on the pitch.

They have plenty of capable openers such as Quinton de Kock, Brendon McCullum, Manan Vohra and Parthiv Patel. Not much has to be said about number three and four, i.e. Virat Kohli and AB de Villiers respectively. They have excellent all-rounders to choose from including Chris Woakes, Moeen Ali and Colin de Grandhomme. They have two fine Indian middle-order batsman in the form of Sarfaraz Khan and Mandeep Singh as well. Their spin department is well endowed with high quality Indian spinners such as Yuzvendra Chahal, Washington Sundar, Pawan Negi and Murugan Ashwin. They have plenty of pacers to choose from, such as Nathan Coulter-Nile, Umesh Yadav, Mohammed Siraj, Aniket Choudhary, Tim Southee and Kulwant Khejroliya.

The Royal Challengers Bangalore have a squad that is capable of taking them all the way to the much coveted trophy this year.