Eliminated Chennai Super Kings look to spoil Kolkata Knight Riders' party

LWWLWWLLWLWL. That's six wins and six losses, all more or less evenly distributed. It's been that sort of season for the Kolkata Knight Riders, who've shown glimpses of being the force they used to be in their glory years, only to regress to the mean immediately afterwards.

That sort of form has left them in a delicate situation with two games left to play in the league phase. They could win just one of them and still make the playoffs, but they could also win both and fail to qualify. With a net run rate of -0.479 - only the bottom two teams currently fare worse - they'll probably need to win two out of two to give themselves a proper chance.

First up they face the Chennai Super Kings, who are out of the reckoning for the playoffs and are now simply looking to, according to their captain MS Dhoni, enjoy the "12 painful hours" they have left in the tournament. Dhoni's math may have been slightly off - he was speaking after the Super Kings' victory over Royal Challengers Bangalore, which was their 12th game of the season - but if his players do find a way to enjoy themselves and play with freedom over their last two games, they could become dangerous opponents.

All the pressure will be on the team that has something to lose.

A knee injury has kept Andre Russell out of the Knight Riders' last three games, and it's not clear whether he's recovered enough to feature on Thursday, but news of his pull-out from the upcoming Lanka Premier League - for which injury has been cited as the reason - suggests he hasn't.

A 51-ball 81 from Rahul Tripathi carried an otherwise misfiring Knight Riders batting unit to 167, and the Super Kings appeared poised to haul it down when they needed 69 from 48 balls with nine wickets in hand. But the Super Kings were unable to deal with Sunil Narine and Russell - all of whose overs had been held back for the last 10 overs - and they imploded to lose by ten runs.

Chennai Super Kings: 1 Ruturaj Gaikwad, 2 Faf du Plessis, 3 Ambati Rayudu, 4 MS Dhoni (capt & wk), 5 N Jagadeesan, 6 Ravindra Jadeja, 7 Sam Curran, 8 Mitchell Santner, 9 Deepak Chahar, 10 Monu Kumar, 11 Imran Tahir.

Kolkata Knight Riders: 1 Shubman Gill, 2 Nitish Rana, 3 Rahul Tripathi, 4 Dinesh Karthik (wk), 5 Eoin Morgan (capt), 6 Sunil Narine, 7 Pat Cummins, 8 Kamlesh Nagarkoti, 9 Lockie Ferguson, 10 Varun Chakravarthy, 11 Prasidh Krishna.