Kolkata Knight Riders received a timely boost ahead of their Indian Premier League 2024 opener against Sunrisers Hyderabad, scheduled for March 23 at Eden Gardens. On Saturday (March 16), the team welcomed back skipper Shreyas Iyer. (More Cricket News)
The Two-time champions took to social media platforms to announce the arrival of their skipper.
Iyer, now 29, has been struggling with a nagging back problem for some time. He missed the last IPL season due to back surgery in April. The talented middle-order batter returned to action in September and scored heavily in the ODI World Cup.
He also played in the first two Tests against England but was dropped from the squad for the remaining three matches of the series. The Mumbai cricketer then found himself embroiled in a contract row with BCCI.
Dropped from the list of centrally contract players, ostensibly for skipping Mumbai's Ranji Trophy quarter-final match, Shreyas Iyer needed to prove his commitment, again. After a lacklustre showing in the semi-final, he scored a fine 95 in Mumbai's second innings against Vidarbha in the final.
It was a knock interspersed with medical attention. Unable to take the field on the last two days of the final, he could only watch his Mumbai teammates win a record-extending 42nd Ranji title from the Wankhede stands. The back injury flared up again, and the IPL schedule for the first two weeks was already out.
KKR doled out INR 12.25 crore to sign Shreyas Iyer in 2022, and the right-handed batter has so far scored 401 runs in 14 matches for the team. He was previously with Delhi Capitals.
After the home match against SRH, KKR will be on the road to take on Royal Challengers Bangalore on March 29 then Delhi Capitals on April 3 (in Visakhapatnam).
Kolkata Knight Riders squad
Shreyas Iyer (c), Nitish Rana, Rinku Singh, Rahmanullah Gurbaz, Jason Roy, Sunil Narine, Suyash Sharma, Anukul Roy, Andre Russell, Venkatesh Iyer, Harshit Rana, Vaibhav Arora, Varun Chakaravarthy, KS Bharat, Chetan Sakariya, Mitchell Starc, Angkrish Raghuvanshi, Ramandeep Singh, Sherfane Rutherford, Manish Pandey, Mujeeb Ur Rahman, Gus Atkinson, Sakib Hussain.
