The way uncapped Indian players came to the fore for KKR is a lesson for several other franchises that rely too much on big names.
It’s perilous to look for patterns in a fickle format like T20 cricket, but what Kolkata Knight Riders’ Indian Premier League triumph, their first in a decade, proves is the benefit of clarity in the assignment of roles to individual players for the good of the team. The franchise didn’t feature any Indian megastars. Their highest scorer, Sunil Narine, sits ninth in the overall chart, but the surprise impact he had at the top of the order was one of the major stories of the tournament. They had only one other player among the top 20, but this was more than compensated by KKR’s strike rates throughout the season.
They didn’t have the highest wicket-taker in their ranks but they had three of the top five wicket-takers, which went a long way in scripting their success in a tournament where batsmen took big hitting to another level. In the afterglow of KKR’s title triumph, whatever they did may be put forth as the right move. But it does shed light on the benefits of continuity and having a settled core. Despite the lack of success over the last several years, they resisted the temptation of a complete overhaul. They broke the bank to get Mitchell Starc, and though the Aussie left-arm pacer was almost a liability in the first half of the tournament, the team management persisted with him and he delivered when it mattered most.
The way uncapped Indian players came to the fore for KKR is a lesson for several other franchises that rely too much on big names. Pacemen Vaibhav Arora and Harshit Rana showed what they are capable of, while Ramandeep Singh was always at hand with some big hits towards the end. Narine, Varun Chakravarthy, Venkatesh Iyer and Andre Russell have been part of the side for a long time and while many other franchises would have considered them past their best, KKR knew that with just a tweak in the game plan, they could turn out to be trump cards.
