KKR Squad IPL 2024: Kolkata Knight Riders (KKR) are one of the most popular franchises in the Indian Premier League, owned by Bollywood actors Shah Rukh Khan and Juhi Chawla and her husband Jay Mehta. KKR have won the IPL title twice in 2012 and 2014.
For the IPL 2024 season, the two-time champions have brought back their former skipper Gautam Gambhir in the role of mentor. Meanwhile, Shreyas Iyer, who missed the last season, returns to lead the franchise but he will be under pressure to seal his place back in India's T20I set-up. Rinku Singh will be the player to watch out for KKR as the pocket dynamo had a memorable last season and will return to the IPL this season with some decent international experience. They have added Aussie pacer Mitchell Starc to their bowling line-up as the franchise splashed a whopping INR 24.5 crore to make him the most expensive player in IPL history.
In the first three seasons of IPL, KKR found it tough to have a footing in the league despite having star players such as Sourav Ganguly, Brendon McCullum, Ricky Ponting, Chris Gayle and Shoaib Akhtar in their ranks. Their best finish in the first three years was sixth.
KKR made it to the playoffs for the first time in 2011 under the captaincy of Gautam Gambhir, who had key players like Yusuf Pathan and Jacques Kallis at his disposal. In 2012, they won their first IPL title and that season Robin Uthappa and Sunil Narine were the star performers. The Kolkata franchise again in 2014 lifted the IPL trophy under Gambhir's captaincy. However, in the subsequent editions their efforts were not good enough to earn them a title, with the franchise not retaining Gambhir ahead of the 2018 auction.
Dinesh Karthik led KKR in the 2018 edition where they finished third and midway through the 2020 edition he handed over the captaincy duties to Eoin Morgan. In the 2021 season, Morgan led KKR to their third final. Shreyas Iyer was appointed captain in 2022 after Morgan went unsold in the auction.
The low point in the Kolkata franchise history has to be the conflict between Ganguly and coach John Buchanan, whose multi-captaincy idea came under criticism. Moreover, leaving out Ganguly ahead of the 2011 season, didn't go well with the KKR fans. After faring poorly in the first four editions of IPL, the revival for KKR happened in 2012 with their first title win and the second IPL title in 2014 put them on the pedestal. After that they haven't looked back and are always one of the top contenders for the trophy.
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