Last season was one of the most memorable editions of T20 League for the way it was executed in a year marred by the Pandemic. The memories might be still fresh but we are already ready to jump into the bandwagon of IPL 2021.

Kolkata Knight Riders have announced their Players Retention list and, barring a few names (Tom Banton, Chris Green, Ali Khan, Nikhil Naik, Siddharth Manimaran, Harry Gurney and Siddhesh Lad), the core team remains the same.

Talking about the narrow window between the two editions of IPL, KKR CEO Venky Mysore said, “Firstly on behalf of KKR, we are really excited about the upcoming IPL season 2021. Seems like 2020 just got over and here we are ready. That’s the excitement of IPL and we have had barely some time to catch our breath. But the real thing that we were really happy about was we had the opportunity to retain our entire squad. Barring some fine tuning, we have pretty much retained the same squad.”

Talking about the retained players, Mysore pointed that the trio of Sunil Narine, Kuldeep Yadav and Varun Chakravarthy would continue to make KKR a very strong spin bowling unit. He also expressed his delight to retain youngsters like Shubman Gill, Shivam Mavi, Kamlesh Nagarkoti and Rahul Tripathi.

“We were very happy with the squad last year. We were just a bit unfortunate and that’s the way it goes. Literally a little bit of run rate issue in the end, even though we were tied on points, didn’t allow us to go further. But I think we will regroup and come in very very strong (this year).

The 2021 auction is likely to happen sometime soon and there will be a few players whom KKR will be looking at to fill the places for the released players. Mysore insisted that those gaps have been kept for some fine-tuning. “We will have some opportunity at the mini auction to maybe do some fine-tuning. So, really looking forward to it and we are ready for IPL 2021!” Mysore added.