Royal Challengers Bangalore experienced a fall from grace in last season, as the finalists of 2016 edition finished at the bottom of the table in the 2017 edition.

Though the disaster can be attributed to things like injuries to Kohli and AB de Villiers and players like Shane Watson being out of form; RCB team management took the result seriously and decided to only retain two big stars in Virat Kohli and AB de Villiers and threw in a googly by retaining Sarfraz Khan, who had missed the 2017 edition due to knee injury.

They had their eyes on some big players and went after them in the auction. They acquired the likes of Quinton de Kock, Brendon McCullum, Washington Sundar, Manan Vohra, Parthiv Patel, Nathan Coulter-Nile and Umesh Yadav.

RCB team has built up a very intimidating squad in the 2018 auction. They have options for almost every slot in the team, the only drawback being that they have a shortage of Indian batsmen. With only Kohli, AB de Villiers and Chahal being the certainties in the playing XI at this point, they will have to give a serious thought to their playing XI. Umesh Yadav can also consider himself to be a certainty, along with maybe Washington Sundar.

RCB bought Brendon McCullum to replace Chris Gayle, after his lackluster performance last year. They also got a formidable keeper in Quinton de Kock, who can also open the innings. They have three choices in overseas all-rounders in Chris Woakes, Moeen Ali and Colin de Grandhomme.

Mohammad Siraj, Aniket Choudhary, and Navdeep Saini are their choices for the second Indian fast bowler to go with either Southee or Coulter-Nile in the team.

With so many choices, RCB team management and Virat Kohli will have to come up with an XI that does an encore of their 2016 edition performance.

Possible playing XI:
Brendon McCullum, Quinton de Kock (WK), Virat Kohli (C), AB de Villiers, Mandeep Singh, Sarfaraz Khan, Washington Sundar, Nathan Coulter-Nile, Yuzvendra Chahal, Mohd Siraj, Umesh Yadav