After a disappointing first half of the Premier League season, the two-time champions will resume their campaign during the UAE leg of the competition, starting September 19. KKR have a great task on their hands to try and resurrect their position in the tournament and enter the playoffs.
The Riders are placed seventh in the points table after the Indian leg of the tournament, with just two wins and five losses in their seven matches. They stand higher to only Sunrisers Hyderabad (1 win, 6 losses) right now and will need to win most of their remaining fixtures to secure a top 4 berth.
But KKR have a history of bouncing back. In their last successful IPL season back in 2014 also, they pulled off an inspirational turnaround in the latter half of their league stage campaign and went on to clinch the prestigious title at the end.
KKR were largely inconsistent with both bat and ball in the Indian leg of the season. Setting themselves up for a high-scoring home venue in Kolkata, they really struggled to get going at a dry, sluggish surface in Chennai. And they failed to make their opportunities in Mumbai and Ahmedabad count – two neutral venues more suited to their style of play.
The captaincy change that was made midway last year, with Eoin Morgan replacing Dinesh Karthik, hasn’t paid the dividends for the team. This, especially as Morgan’s own performances with the bat, haven’t lived up to his reputation and the fans’ expectations of the Irishman.
The skipper has only made 92 runs this season at an average of 15.33 and strike-rate of 112.19. There have been calls from certain sections for Morgan to drop himself from the playing XI to make space for a more in-form KKR batsman. But the skipper has the team management and the ownership group firmly standing behind him, backing him to produce the goods sooner rather than later.
Prediction
One thing Morgan can perhaps console himself with is the knowledge that it is not just him who has struggled to get going for KKR this season. Most of the team’s batsmen are carrying poor averages and indifferent strike-rates heading into the UAE leg.
Left-hander Nitish Rana is the franchise’s top run-maker in IPL 2021 at this stage. But his 201 runs have come at only 28.71 runs per innings and a scoring rate of just 122.56.
On the bowling front, while their top wicket-taker is Pat Cummins with 9 scalps, their most misery among those who have featured in all games so far has been Varun Chakravarthy (ER 7.82).
While a fourth-month halt in the proceedings would’ve been expected to provide a break, there is no real respite coming their way as venues in Dubai, Abu Dhabi, and Sharjah are going to test their resolve just as hard.
Leave aside Sharjah, where their power-hitters would love the flat surface and small boundary dimensions, but Abu Dhabi and Dubai are, again, like Chennai, quite attritional in the way they play.
And that’s a problem for the Riders, whose five of the remaining seven matches are at these two grounds.
In all honesty, however, it is not so much the venues holding them back. For a while, it has been the deeper issues with their batting unit – which is quite one-dimensional and looks made for high-scoring grounds only – and their bowling that has had talented but inexperienced and thus inconsistent young quicks failing to cover up bases.
After a horror first half, it does look as if KKR have already conceded too much ground and will not be able to make the playoffs.
