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Dinesh Karthik surprised everyone when he decided to hand over the captaincy of the Kolkata Knight Riders (KKR) in the middle of Indian Premier League (IPL) 2020 to Eoin Morgan. Karthik gave the reason that he wanted to concentrate on his batting and wicketkeeping.
However, ever since relinquishing the captaincy, Karthik has had scores of 4,29,4,3,0 and 21* as his struggle with the willow continued. In fact, when the Tamil Nadu cricketer was the leader of the Knight Riders during the initial stage of the tournament, he had managed to score a fifty against Kings XI Punjab (KXIP).
Meanwhile, former KKR skipper Gautam Gambhir has criticised Karthik for leaving the big responsibility mid-way of the competition. While speaking to cricket.com, the former India opener didn’t look satisfied with the reason given by Karthik to withdraw the leadership of KKR.
“It just shows the mindset. You left captaincy because you wanted to concentrate on batting, but then it hasn’t worked, so probably sometimes it’s good when you take up responsibilities, what I’ve realised when I was through a worse phase in 2014. I got three ducks in a row when we started the tournament. It was captaincy that helped me that I could get back into form,” said Gambhir.
Gambhir went on to give his own example as he explained how Karthik could’ve overcome the challenging phase.
“The reason why because when I was not batting, I was thinking about how to make the team win through my captaincy and the decision making. But when you’re not captaining, you’re thinking even more about your batting,” added Gambhir.
The game is not yet over for KKR
The Knight Riders aren’t entirely out of playoffs race yet. However, they need quite a few results to fall in their favour. They have a Net Run Rate (NRR) of -0.467 and need to win their final game of the season with a big margin.
The reason behind this is that Sunrisers Hyderabad (SRH) have a better run-rate than them. In fact, SRH have a positive NRR (+0.396).
KKR’s next match is against Rajasthan Royals (RR) on Sunday. RR recently defeated KXIP to capture the fifth position in the points table.
The equation for KKR to qualify for the playoffs depends on a few factors; firstly, they need to win a game against RR and hope for Punjab as well as SRH to lose their remaining fixtures.
