While the defending champions Chennai Super Kings (CSK) has a well-balanced squad with most of the bases covered, RCB is facing concerns over the availability of some foreign players. Chennai Super Kings has defeated Royal Challengers Bangalore 14 times in 22 meetings, including the last six. The visiting team hasn’t registered a win over the defending champion since 2014 and not in Chepauk since 2008. Will the trend change on Saturday?

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The CSK will start the campaign to save its title against the RCB team at M.A. Chidambaram Stadium. For Virat Kohli, it couldn't be a bigger statement if his young side could start off with a bang at Mahendra Singh Dhoni's "spiritual home", a task which will be easier said than done.

CSK's core members are the oldest in IPL 2019: Mahendra Singh Dhoni and Shane Watson are 37, 35-year-old Dwayne Bravo, 34-year-old Faf du Plessis and 33-year-old Ambati Rayudu and Kedar Jadhav are included in the CSK team.  Apart from them, 31-year-old Karan Sharma and 30-year-old Mohit Sharma are also in the team. Watson had scored two centuries in the last season and in the Pakistan Super League last year, he scored 423 runs in 11 matches at an average of 47. Ambati Rayudu and Dhoni had shown a fantastic game in the last season and they would also like to repeat this too.

Virat Kohli would like to perform in the T20 league in the wake of the upcoming World Cup. Kohli has always led from the front and his exploits in the IPL are well documented, the RCB skipper will begin yet another campaign aware that his form could prove vital in the success of his side in the grueling tournament. He scored 4 centuries in 2016, but the previous year was not good for him. AB De Villiers has retired from international cricket and he would like to get rid of RCB in the IPL.

Here are the squads of both the teams:

RCB squad: Virat Kohli (captain), AB de Villiers, Parthiv Patel (WK), Marcus Stoinis, Shimron Hetmyer, Shivam Dube, Nathan Coulter-Nile, Washington Sundar, Umesh Yadav, Yuzvendra Chahal, Mohammed Siraj, Heinrich Klaasen (WK), Moeen Ali, Colin de Grandhomme, Pawan Negi, Tim Southee, Akshdeep Nath, Milind Kumar, Devdutt Padikkal, Gurkeerat Singh, Prayas Ray Barman, Kulwant Kejroliya, Navdeep Saini, Himmat Singh.

CSK squad: MS Dhoni (captain & WK), Suresh Raina, Ambati Rayudu, Shane Watson, Faf du Plessis, Murali Vijay, Kedar Jadhav, Sam Billings, Ravindra Jadeja, Dhruv Shorey, Chaitanya Bishnoi, Rituraj Gaikwad, Dwayne Bravo, Karn Sharma, Imran Tahir, Harbhajan Singh, Mitchell Santner, Shardul Thakur, Mohit Sharma, K M Asif, David Willey, Deepak Chahar, N Jagadeesan.

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