IPL 2018: How each franchise might line up

#8 Royal Challengers Bangalore

Virat Kohli will lead the RCB squad

List of players bought by the RCB at the IPL 2018 auction –

Virat Kohli, AB de Villiers, Sarfaraz Khan, Brendon Mccullum, Chris Woakes, Colin de Grandhomme, Moeen Ali, Quinton De Kock, Umesh Yadav, Yuzvendra Chahal, Manan Vohra, Aniket Choudhary, Navdeep Saini, Murugan Ashwin, Mandeep Singh, Washington Sundar, Pawan Negi, Nathan Coulter-Nile, Mohammed Siraj, Anirudha Joshi, Parthiv Patel, Tim Southee, Pavan Deshpande

Last but not the least, RCB are one of the favourites to lift the cup this season. They have always been a star-studded team, but, this time, they have focused on building up a balanced squad.

Virat Kohli will lead the RCB squad and the probable 11 for them is as follows:

B McCullum; P Patel(wk); Virat Kohli(c); AB De Villiers; M Singh; Sarfaraz Khan; C Woakes; W Sundar; T Southee; Y Chahal; U Yadav.

With a balanced batting lineup and a decent bowling lineup, RCB are all set to start their campaign with a rather stable side as compared to their previous seasons. They had issues with their pace attack which they tried to resolve by adding some quality pacers like Woakes, Yadav and Southee to their squad.

Everyone was hoping to see the combination of Kuldeep and Chahal don the reds of RCB but we will witness a different combination, that of Sundar and Chahal. Good news for RCB is that all of their bowlers performed really well in their recent international matchups. Both Woakes and Sundar bagged player of the tournament awards in their respective tournaments.

However, they lack a part-timer who can be used in case a full-time bowler is not doing well on a particular day.

Coming to the batting, a lineup with Kohli, De Villiers and McCullum can go through any bowling lineup they want along with Parthiv and Sarfaraz who add a different flair to the side.

They also have a good bench strength and have a lot of options there too.