Last Updated on 5 years by Charbel Coorey
Former Indian batsman and current commentator Sunil Gavaskar believes KKR should replace Dinesh Karthik with Eoin Morgan as captain should Kolkata Knight Riders make a poor start to their IPL 2020 campaign.
KKR will be playing against current champions Mumbai Indians at the Sheikh Zayed Stadium in Abu Dhabi. Though the Rohit Sharma-led team lost the opening match to Chennai Super Kings, the squad looks promising with names like Jasprit Bumrah, Trent Boult, Kieron Pollard among others.
On the other end, Kolkata’s team, led by Dinesh Karthik, now has Eoin Morgan, which makes the team an even more dangerous unit than before. Morgan’s World Cup winning streak from last year has garnered high hopes from the team. Former Indian Captain Sunil Gavaskar too believes that Morgan’s induction in KKR’s team has made their middle order even more stronger.
“Kolkata Knight Riders is such a team that has a very attractive and aggressive batting order. But the addition of Eoin Morgan to the middle-order has added more stability and experience to it. Thus, he can prove to be very dangerous,” Gavaskar said in an interview on Sports Tak.
Gavaskar went on to say that there are slight chances that the team managemenet would replace the current captain Dinesh Karthik with Morgan if the first few matches don’t go as planned. “Even this can happen that if in the first four-five games if KKR do not start well, then Eoin Morgan can replace Dinesh Karthik as the captain of the side because we always have had that complex,” Gavaskar said.
Both MI and KKR look strong going by their squad as Hardik Pandya, Quinton de Kock, Rohit Sharma, Sunil Narine and Andre Russell are all key players who can change the course of the match. After the first loss for MI, it will be exciting to see how the four time champions strategise for the upcoming game. On the other hand, KKR’s bolstered squad ensures enought quality on field. This season, the Knight Riders have also bought Pat Cummins for a whopping price of 15.5 crore at the auctions last year.
“KKR have the biggest T20 player in Andre Russell, but they also have the costliest player in Pat Cummins. In the recently concluded limited-overs series between Australia and England, his performance was not impressive. So there will be some kind of pressure on him. Whenever you are a costly player, the weight of the price tag is always there. Will he play all the matches? That is also something that we will need to look at,” said Gavaskar.
Written by Anjali Jha. Follow Anjali on Twitter today.
