Is Rahmanullah Gurbaz playing today's KKR vs SRH, Qualifier 1 of IPL 2024?

Rahmanullah Gurbaz is set to play his first match of the ongoing IPL 2024. The Afghan wicketkeeper-batter was named in Kolkata Knight Riders' (KKR) playing XI for the Qualifier 1 clash against the SunRisers Hyderabad (SRH) at the Narendra Modi Stadium on Tuesday, May 21.

Gurbaz featured in KKR's starting XI for their final league fixture of the season against the Rajasthan Royals (RR), but the match was abandoned due to rain. The swashbuckling batter replaced Phil Salt, who returned to England for national duty.

Gurbaz did a decent job last season, amassing 227 across 11 outings at a strike rate of 133.53, including two half-centuries. The 22-year-old has big shoes to fill, considering that Salt has been one of KKR's top performers in IPL 2023, chalking up 435 runs in 12 innings at an average of 39.54 and a strike rate of 182.00.

The winner of the Qualifier 1 will advance straight to the playoffs. The team that loses this encounter, will have to compete in the Qualifier 2 against the winner of Eliminator featuring Rajasthan Royals (RR) and Royal Challengers Bengaluru (RCB).

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KKR to bowl first as SRH opt to bat first in Qualifier 1 of IPL 2024

Hyderabad skipper Pat Cummins won the toss and elected to bat first in the crucial match. Speaking at the toss, Kolkata skipper Shreyas Iyer stated that they would have anyway bowled first on this surface.

Iyer said:

"I would have loved to bowl. I had a chat with the curator and he said it's a mixed soil, let's see how it plays, hoping for a good game. Important that we keep the momentum going and stay in the present. Great achievement (being the table-toppers) and everyone is proud of it, we are taking one match at a time and we need to be positive about what's going to happen here."

Here are the playing XIs for the Qualifier 1:

SRH: Travis Head, Abhishek Sharma, Rahul Tripathi, Nitish Reddy, Heinrich Klaasen (wk), Abdul Samad, Shahbaz Ahmed, Pat Cummins (c), Bhuvneshwar Kumar, Vijayakanth Viyaskanth, and T Natarajan.

Impact subs: Sanvir Singh, Umran Malik, Glenn Phillips, Washington Sundar, and Jaydev Unadkat.

KKR: Rahmanullah Gurbaz (wk), Sunil Narine, Venkatesh Iyer, Shreyas Iyer (c), Rinku Singh, Andre Russell, Ramandeep Singh, Mitchell Starc, Vaibhav Arora, Harshit Rana, and Varun Chakaravarthy.

Impact subs: Anukul Roy, Manish Pandey, Nitish Rana, KS Bharat, and Sherfaine Rutherford.