Brabourne Stadium, Kolkata Knight Riders’ unsuitable destination

In cricket, players, as well as the teams, enjoy playing at some particular venues. They are not necessarily located at home, as more often than not, they even own homes away from home with the sheer artistry of performance. In contrast, a few venues become so unpleasant for some teams and players that they do hate to play there. The second part only happens after consistent failures.

Even before the RR contest, the KKR played at the same venue in their last two fixtures. They lost both of them, and with the latest heartbreak, they completed the hat-trick of defeats, something quite similar to what Yuzvendra Chahal did against them yesterday, but in a negative way.

To be honest, the KKR seemed to be the second favourite side in all three previous encounters at Brabourne Stadium. Their bowlers, barring Sunil Narine, were leaking runs with the lacklustre collective show, while none of their batters is yet to bring the stability in the ongoing edition. They looked doomed. They looked shattered more often than not.

The resurgence of Umesh Yadav was instrumental for KKR’s success in the first four matches in IPL 2022, of which they registered three wins. Their batters put on a disastrous show against the Royal Challengers Bangalore (RCB), but their bowlers stepped up to keep the contest alive till the final over. The game against the Mumbai Indians (MI) saw a Pat Cummins blitz – the joint-fastest IPL fifty – driving them home in a hurry. And the match against Punjab Kings (PBKS) was nothing but the Andre Russell special.

After yesterday’s defeat, the KKR head coach Brendon McCullum pointed out an important aspect from their point of view. “We've had three losses in a row and we're going to have to find a way to keep our morale high which is so vitally important. There can be a tendency to run away from things when you haven't got across the line in a couple of key games. We just have to keep pushing ourselves, make sure we stick together and stay composed. We've been there before and it's going to test us again this time,” McCullum said at the post-match conference. 

Yes, teams do face difficulties when they have to digest a defeat from a winning position, but that does not mean it was their last chance or more precisely, it was not the end of the world.

The KKR’s think tank needs to shake up now. They should forget what could have happened in their debatable disappointing IPL 2022 mega auction, where they failed to acquire a genuine well-known wicket-keeper. The struggle in the middle order is well visible because of that, as despite the presence of Sheldon Jackson, they failed to score 12 off the last eight balls against the RR in a game where more than 435 runs had been scored.

What would the KKR do next, ideally? The first bold move they should make is to bench their INR 7.25 crore signing Cummins. In 15.5 overs in IPL 2022, Australia’s Test captain conceded 190 runs for one wicket, which is more than 12 runs an over. No side can win a match if your leading fast bowler is smacked in this fashion on a regular basis.

The next daring move KKR should make is to leave out Varun Chakravarthy. The mystery spinner is having a lean patch, going for 15 runs an over in the last two matches. His outing against the Delhi Capitals (DC) was not great either, returning 1-44 in his allotted four overs. They should replace him with Ramesh Kumar, the 23-year-old left-arm spinner from Jalalabad who has the ability to turn the ball in both ways. In fact, he might yet to play any representative cricket but was fondly called left-arm Sunil Narine among his teammates.

Start with these two courageous moves. Then we will find if Brabourne Stadium was truly KKR’s unsuitable destination, or there was a lack of planning in the build-up, which interrupted their winning momentum.