The IPL season 8 kicked-off in grand fashion on Tuesday evening at the Salt Lake Stadium, Kolkata; while today marks the official commencement of the tourney with Kolkata’s very own Knight Riders facing the formidable Mumbai Indians at Eden Gardens – The Mecca of Indian Cricket.
AnimationXpress.com calls today’s clash as the fight for supremacy between The Dark Knight of KKR and Captain Marvel of Mumbai Indians; but then we have already spoken about this clash earlier, as we believe in ‘living in the future’.
The next clash lined-up for Thursday will witness the two time champs Chennai Super Kings (CSK), who have also been the most consistent team across all seasons, take on the Delhi Daredevils (DD).
CSK would look to put behind the off-field distractions and do what they are best at when they take on previous edition’s bottom-placed Delhi Daredevils in their opening encounter.
CSK has managed to retain the nucleus of the side and invested in Irfan Pathan, Michael Hussey, Kyle Abott, Rahul Sharma; also boosted by the presence of New Zealand captain Brendon McCullum, who had a fabulous World Cup recently, and Dwayne Smith at the top of the order.
The Daredevils, on the other hand, have once again gone for a complete overhaul of their side, but managed to bring in a few big names during the high-profile IPL auction. Showing a lot of belief in India discard – Yuvraj Singh – the Delhi outfit purchased him for a record Rs 16 crore after intense bidding among four franchises. Under the captaincy of Jean-Paul Duminy, the team would be preparing to turn its fortunes around in the 2015 season.
AnimationXpress further brings forth the clash of two super humans from CSK and DD namely MS Dhoni and JP Duminy, but with an animated twist.
Facing apocalypse-level events is nothing new to our First Avenger, Captain America. Known for his strategic leadership steering his team through crisis, Captain America is a true soldier on the battle-field, very much like our Indian Captain Mahendra Singh Dhoni. Not only does Dhoni’s cool-minded captaincy take relevance from Captain America’s leadership but his on-field dependable performance both in front and behind the stumps make him Chennai Super King’s First Avenger.
The South African left-handed batsman leads the Devils of Delhi this IPL. With some incredible innings to his name, Duminy is our animated hero, Mr. Incredible. In his Test cricket debut, Duminy helped guide South Africa to a successful chase of 414 in Perth with an unbeaten 50, and then he followed that with a serene 166 in Melbourne to rescue his team from the prospect of a huge deficit. Truly incredible!
Keep watching this space to see which other lucky cricketers get to feature as an animated version of themselves in the coming days…
Chennai Super Kings: MS Dhoni (captain), Suresh Raina, Ravichandran Ashwin, Ravindra Jadeja, Mohit Sharma, Brendon McCullum, Dwayne Bravo, Dwayne Smith, Faf Du Plessis, Matt Henry, Samuel Badree, Michael Hussey, Kyle Abbott, Andrew Tye, Pawan Negi, Ashish Nehra, Baba Aparajith, Ishwar Pandey, Mithun Manhas, Ronit More, Rahul Sharma, Ankush Bains, Irfan Pathan, Pratyush Singh, Eklavya Dwivedi.
Delhi Daredevils: JP Duminy (captain), Yuvraj Singh, Manoj Tiwary, Quinton De Kock, Imran Tahir, Nathan Coulter-Nile, Angelo Mathews, Gurinder Sandhu, Travis Head, Albie Morkel, Markus Stoinis, Kedar Jadhav, Mayank Agarwal, Mohammed Shami, Amit Mishra, Jaidev Unadkat, Zaheer Khan, Shahbaz Nadeem, Saurabh Tiwary, Jayant Yadav, Shreyas Iyer, CM Gautam, Srikar Bharat, KK Jiyas, Domnic Joseph.