Lucknow, April 26 (IANS) Lucknow Super Giants have brought in left-arm spinner George Linde as captain Rishabh Pant won the toss and elected to bowl first against Kolkata Knight Riders in match 38 of IPL 2026 at the Bharat Ratna Shri Atal Bihari Vajpayee Ekana Cricket Stadium on Sunday.

Both LSG and KKR need a win in a bid to turn around their struggling campaigns. LSG have managed just two wins in seven games to be in ninth place in the points table, while KKR have only one victory in as many matches and are at the bottom of the tally.

After winning the toss, Pant said Linde comes in for M Siddharth in the playing eleven. “We want to again put the opposition in the back first and just find the answer as a batting group.

“Definitely, we are working towards it. When there are lots of leaders in the family, you have to find a way, and we are pretty close to finding ways, and we gotta just stick together, stay tight, because we know that we can turn around the season from here, and I’m pretty confident to make it happen. See, definitely any kind of confidence is definitely needed, and we’ll take that one too,” he said.

KKR skipper Ajinkya Rahane said his playing eleven is unchanged. “We are working towards it. We have to find a way; we are pretty close to it. We know we can turn around the season from here, I am pretty confident,” he said.

Playing XIs:

Kolkata Knight Riders: Ajinkya Rahane (captain), Tim Seifert (wk), Angkrish Raghuvanshi, Cameron Green, Rovman Powell, Rinku Singh, Sunil Narine, Anukul Roy, Ramandeep Singh, Kartik Tyagi, Vaibhav Arora

Impact substitutes: Manish Pandey, Finn Allen, Tejasvi Singh Dahiya, Navdeep Saini, and Varun Chakaravarthy

Lucknow Super Giants: Mitchell Marsh, Aiden Markram, Rishabh Pant (captain & wk), Ayush Badoni, Nicholas Pooran, Mukul Choudhary, George Linde, Digvesh Rathi, Mohammed Shami, Prince Yadav, Mohsin Khan

Impact substitutes: Himmat Singh, Akshat Raghuvanshi, Abdul Samad, Avesh Khan, and M Siddharth

–IANS

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