It is pretty difficult to digest the fact that team comprising of modern-day stars like Virat Kohli and AB De Villiers-Chris Gayle couldn’t manage to win a single season of the Indian Premier League (IPL). However, this seems to be the only bug in the Royal Challengers Bangalore (RCB) team as even their fans are eagerly waiting for the moment when the star-studded team will lift the trophy some year. Despite the fact that there has been complete revamp of the team has been done in the RCB squad in the IPL 2018 auctions and they have selected a formidable squad for sure by retaining their pillar Kohli, ABD, and Yuzvendra Chahal, but there are still a few players who will be missed in the upcoming season of IPL.

Over the years, RCB has always been filled with a plethora of individual match-winners but they couldn’t manage to amalgamate it into a great team which will lift the IPL trophy. However, they came very close in the 2016 season to lift the trophy as they reached the final but lost to David Warner’s Sunrisers Hyderabad (SRH). Even in that season batsmen helped them to reach the finals more than the bowlers.

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2016 was the most successful season for RCB in all terms as they were the runners-up and in that season it was Kohli, KL Rahul, ABD, Chahal, Kane Richardson, Chris Gayle, Shane Watson, Sarfraz Khan. Among the above-stated list, apart from Virat, ABD, Chahal, and Sarfraz, all the other players will be definitely missed in the upcoming season of IPL. This year all these players will play for different IPL franchises like Rahul will play for Rajasthan Royals (RR), Gayle will play for Kings XI Punjab (KXIP), Watson will play for Chennai Super Kings (CSK), but Richardson had decided not to play his IPL season.

However, one needs to accept the fact that for IPL 2018, RCB team management has done immense improvement in their bowling department as they have bought bowlers like Nathan Coulter-Nile, Moeen, Murugan Ashwin, Colin de Grandhomme, Navdeep Saini, Washington Sundar, Mohammed Siraj, Chris Woakes and Umesh Yadav.

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In 2017, it was the combinations of Umesh, Woakes and Coulter-Nile, who bundled out RCB for their lowest score of 47. Now, the questions arise is whether the SRH team management has been successful in finding apt replacements of these missing cogs from the team and the answer to that will be, yes up to some extent they have found the replacements. Let’s have a look at it:

KL Rahul – Manan Vohra

Kane Richardson – Nathan Coulter-Nile

Chris Gayle – Brendon McCullum

Shane Watson – Chris Woakes

The only real weakness that may come up for the Royal Challengers Bangalore is the lack of a good Indian fast bowler. Both Umesh and Siraj are known to be very erratic. They may not be able to stop the run-flow and may leak the pressure built by spinners.

Royals Challengers Bangalore IPL 2018 Squad:

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