Apart from retaining Rinku Singh, Varun Chakravarthy, Andre Russell, Sunil Narine, Harshit Rana and Ramandeep Singh, and buying back Anrich Nortje, they have nine players out of ten from the team that won IPL 2024.
“Auctions are just this way,” KKR CEO Venky Mysore said of the splurge on Venkatesh. “At the end of the day, it’s about the player you want and the type of player you want in the setup. Of course, prices have a meaning within a certain band and that’s why it surprises you all the time. When you have a salary limits as this one goes up (120 million rupees compared to 100 million rupees in the last auction), obviously [player] prices will also increase. For us it was about trying to maintain our core. We have retained six players and have recovered 2 or 3 players from last year. That was always the kind of thinking and as far as he (Venkatesh) was concerned, we definitely didn’t want to find ourselves in a situation where we can’t hit him back. But it always balances out. When you look at Quinton de Kock (INR 3.60 crore) and Nortje (INR 6.50 crore) that we have chosen, it balances out in many ways. Generally speaking, everything works.
“They have shown on the field what they can do. You saw it in a championship year, and one year we also reached the final, in 2021. He (Venkatesh) was a very instrumental and fantastic guy in the team. He had clearly given us an ultimatum: ‘If they don’t pick me, I’ll be very sad,’ so we didn’t want him to be sad and we’re also very happy.
On the first day of the auction, as many as three players fetched deals of over Rs 20 crore each, with two of them – former KKR captain Shreyas Iyer and Rishabh Pant – breaking the previous record for the biggest IPL deals . When asked if he was surprised by the high prices this time, as many big-name players wanted to explore the market, Mysore said: “To be honest, not really. The players just set their base prices, we are the ones who are lifting the paddle. “It’s always a function of what the availability of the bag is and in that situation and when it’s not, I still maintain that the RTM rule should have been the previous rule.”
Venkatesh Iyer ‘more than happy’ to be KKR captain
“I had the opportunity to captain the team in the absence of Nitish Rana when he unfortunately got injured, and I was also the vice-captain,” Venkatesh was quoted as saying. PTI. “I have always believed that captaincy is just a label, but leadership is about creating an environment where everyone feels they can play for this team and contribute. If I was given the responsibility, I would be more than happy to take it on. Together, “Our goal will be to defend the championship and continue our winning campaign.”
“To be honest, I am lost for words, but I am delighted to be a part of the KKR team once again,” Venkatesh said. “The KKR coach [Chandrakant Pandit] He was also my coach in Madhya Pradesh. We were discussing how nervous I was about returning to KKR. But again, it’s a message of the franchise’s focus on winning championships and developing players and how much they value their players. “I am delighted to be playing for KKR again and happy that they have shown so much faith in me.”
