The captain is only as good as his team, but a true leader can inspire a team to do great things.
The Indian Premier League – the world’s most competitive T20 league – has seen many successful captains throughout its history, from Shane Warne to MS Dhoni to Rohit Sharma.
Three teams will potentially seek new captains at the upcoming mega player auction are RCB, KKR, & PK. In the auction pool, they will have a variety of options, both foreign and domestic.
Royal Challengers Bangalore
In IPL 2021, Virat Kohli dropped a bombshell when he announced he would be stepping down as Royal Challengers Bangalore’s captain at the end of the season. RCB had been led by Kohli for eight seasons without winning the coveted title. With 6283 runs from 207 games and 5 hundreds and 42 fifties, Kohli is the top run-getter in the IPL with RCB in his entire career.
The RCB lack a leader for the upcoming season, even though they have retained Kohli, who, incidentally, has also taken a Rs 2 Crore salary cut (Rs 15 Crore) along with Australia’s Glenn Maxwell and India pacer Mohammed Siraj.
As part of the mega auction in Bengaluru, the perennial underachievers will try to build a new squad, as well as find a leader.
The RCB retained Virat Kohli, Glenn Maxwell, and Mohammed Siraj
Kolkata Knight Riders
Kolkata Knight Riders retained four players, but released skipper Eoin Morgan and former captain Dinesh Karthik. KKR may look for a new leader in the mega auction.
England’s World Cup-winning skipper Morgan was appointed KKR captain before the last season, and he led the team to the play-offs by finishing 4th in the league standings. In the end, they finished runners-up, losing to CSK by 27 runs in the final.
Morgan was not one of the four players retained by KKR despite his good run.
The KKR retained Andre Russell, Venkatesh Iyer, Varun Chakaravarthy, and Sunil Narine
Punjab Kings
Out of the 8 older teams in the league, Punjab Kings is one of only three teams without a trophy (along with DC and RCB). In the last two seasons, they were led by prolific runscorer KL Rahul, but their fortunes did not improve.
Since 2014, when they finished as runners-up, the Punjab franchise hasn’t qualified for the IPL playoffs.
They finished sixth in both seasons (2020 and 2021) despite Rahul making more than 600 runs as PK skipper. The new team Lucknow has signed India vice-captain Rahul as their captain, leaving PK without a captain for the upcoming season. Punjab retained only two players before the next edition of the player auction.
Mayank Agarwal, Arshdeep Singh were retained by PK
