Along with the signings of Rinku Singh, Varun Chakravarthy, Andre Russell, Sunil Narine, Harshit Rana and Ramandeep Singh, and buying Anrich Nortje again, they have nine players out of 10 from the team that won the 2024 IPL.
“Auctions are just this way,” KKR CEO Venky Mysore said of Venkatesh’s spending. “At the end of the day, what matters is the player you want and the type of player you want in the setup. Of course, prices have a meaning within a certain range and that’s why it surprises you all the time. limits like this rising (INR 120 million compared to 100 million in the last auction) obviously [player] prices will also increase. For us, it was about trying to maintain our essence. We kept six players and brought back 2-3 players from last year. That was always the kind of thinking and as far as he (Venkatesh) was concerned, we definitely didn’t want to find ourselves in a situation where we wouldn’t be able to get him back. But it always balances out. When you look at Quinton de Kock (INR 3.60 million) and Nortje (INR 6.50 million) that we picked, it balances out in many ways. Overall, everything works out.
“They proved on the field what they can do. You saw a championship year, and a year where we went to the final too, in 2021. He (Venkatesh) was a highly instrumental and incredible guy on the team. He clearly gave us an ultimatum: ‘If you don’t choose me, I’ll be very sad,’ so we didn’t want him to be sad and we’re also very happy.”
The first day of the auction saw as many as three players trade over INR 20 crore each, with two of them – former KKR captain Shreyas Iyer and Rishabh Pant – breaking the previous record for the biggest IPL deals. When asked if this time he was surprised by the big prices as many big-name players wanted to tap the market, Mysore said, “Not really, to be honest. Players only put in their base prices, we are the ones raising the racket is always a function of bag availability, and in this situation and at the time, I still maintain that the RTM rule should have been the old rule.
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