‘Wanted to give him a fair chance’ – Dinesh Karthik on handing KKR’s leadership mantle to Morgan

The fact that Dinesh Karthik was retained as the skipper of the Kolkata Knight Riders (KKR) despite having Eoin Morgan for the 2020 Indian Premier League (IPL) raised a lot of eyebrows. Morgan was the 2019 World Cup-winning England skipper even as Karthik failed to take KKR to the IPL playoffs in the same year. Morgan joined the Knights after being bought at a price of INR 5.25 crores.

Midway through the 2020 edition, it was learned that Karthik had relinquished captaincy and Morgan took over from there onwards. Though it didn’t turn the Knights’ fortunes around, the Men in Gold and Purple persisted with Morgan as the skipper for the 2021 edition as well.

Going down the memory lane, Karthik stated that KKR weren’t performing well under him, and hence, he stepped down from captaincy. In 2020, the Knights finished with seven wins from 14 games and missed a playoff berth after an inferior net run rate.

I think I earned the trust of the boys: Dinesh Karthik

“I wanted to give Morgan a chance because it was really important, we had played seven and there were seven more games to go, so we had enough time. It would have been very unfair of me to move on if we were doing so badly that we had no chance further in the tournament,” Karthik was quoted as saying in a video on KKR’s website.

“In the 2.5 years that I have led the team, I think I earned the trust of the boys. I think that’s very important as a leader. They know for a fact that they would get a lot of honesty from me. That makes things easy and Morgan is very similar to me on that front. I think the boys believed that both the people put the team ahead of themselves and that’s why the decision was taken,” he added.

In the ongoing IPL edition, the Knights started with a victory over the Sunrisers Hyderabad (SRH) at the MA Chidambaram Stadium in Chennai. At the same venue, they lost to the Mumbai Indians (MI). In their third game, KKR are set to face the Royal Challengers Bangalore (RCB) at the Chepauk on Sunday.