Kolkata Knight Riders fans are on a journey. The season is not going according to them and they want a change at the top. Press picks it up. "Captaincy questioned by fans," the first headlines announced. A few days later, another defeat and this time in place of the captain "Furious KKR fans want". After a week or two there are "angry KKR fans" who want a new leader. So far this story has grown so much that Kapil Dev is asked to comment on it. Brad Hogg is also defending the troubled captain of his former team.
Right now you are probably thinking of Eoin Morgan and the first half of KKR's season earlier this year. Then the only thing that seemed to prevent Morgan from losing his job was the Covid-19 outbreak which led to the suspension of the season.
But I hadn't completely written off those headlines before.
"Annoyed KKR fans want Eoin Morgan to replace Dinesh Karthik as captain" and "furious KKR fans want Eoin Morgan to replace Dinesh Karthik as captain after Sharjah defeat".
They were actually from last season.
Less than 12 months ago, fans of KKR suggested on social media that the then captain Dinesh Karthik should be sacked and Morgan should be replaced. At the halfway point of the next tournament - not even a full year later - fans have started asking Morgan to be fired.
This was reviewed was Eoin Morgan.. @KKRiders SACK HIM FROM KKR CAPTAINCY. #TheHundred . pic.twitter.com/QJwNMs7BQW
— MAKE IYER T-20 CAPTAIN. (@Devastated_Soul) August 3, 2021
If @GautamGambhir can play, please retain him!
— Ajesh Banerjee 🏏 (@iamajeshB) April 30, 2021
Sack Eoin Morgan immediately. Remove the openers. Bring back the old combination.
Look at CSK, they are old players but still more valuable than gold!
#SackManagementSaveKKR
Morgan's leadership is high in England because he brought to them something they almost gave up on. This Dublin middle-order player came to the fore and led England to a World Cup victory.
Ever since the world left the red ball for white, he had become a laughing stock. When Morgan took over in 2015, England were not a limited overs team, they were just limited. He stumbled across the world in search of equal sums, and used his overused test seamer in hopes that the magic would work.
It didn't.
Then a failed Test player who loved the IPL came along and went on to win his first 50-over World Cup. So when Nick Hoult and Steve James wrote their book on England's victory and the rise before it, it was definitely called Morgan's Men: The Inside Story of England's Rise from Cricket World Cup Humiliation to Glory.
Obviously others helped. Andrew Strauss played a big part in changing the plan and focus around the format and allowing English players to stay in the IPL. Trevor Bayliss was a renowned white-ball coach who changed the mindset of his playing. And with the ECB analyzer system Nathan Lemmon was being heard more and given more power.
But in cricket we have given extraordinary powers to the captain. A similar position in another sport is the American football quarterback, although he receives constant real-time instruction from his coach. A captain is there alone, making the decisions, and when his team wins, we admire him unbelievably. So they were Morgan's men and they were given the CBE. This year, by resting players with the T20 World Cup in mind, the ECB prioritized Morgan's needs in place of Joe Root, while England were playing for a chance to make the World Test Championship final.
It was clear to any English fan who had seen generations of boring middle overs and death spells go wrong that Morgan was a genius.
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The first half of the 2021 season, Kolkata was not winning, and the general impression of fans on social media was that Morgan was not a good strategist. He complained that he was a laptop captain, that he was not reacting to the game, that he had made too many errors, and that his selection was an issue. Even if any of these are true, Kolkata's biggest problem was with their batting and bowling.
Let's start with batting. There's a lot of talent out there. The top three of Shubman Gill, Rahul Tripathi and Nitish Rana are solid, which means that KKR can bolster their middle order with foreign players. When he had Pat Cummins, he batted under eight. Yet this season their line-up averaged 21.76 runs per wicket in seven matches before Kovid broke out. For comparison, Delhi Capitals averaged 40.15 and Chennai Super Kings' 37.79. And that is the strength of Kolkata.
His bowling was bad. He basically has no new-ball seamer that he can rely on. So they are trying to cover it by bowling Varun Chakravarthy in a few overs and joining the powerplay with Shakib Al Hasan, Harbhajan Singh, Sunil Narine and even Rana. After ten matches, those spinners had bowled 45% of KKR's powerplay overs. Their spinners are financially ahead, but they don't take wickets. And neither are their seamers. As a team, they have taken 11 wickets in the powerplay this season.
Shivam Mavi feels he could be fit to bowl ahead but so far he has struggled for wickets and has gone for more than eight overs. Because Cummins is brilliant, people think he can do it all, but in T20 the older the ball, the better it gets. And the famous Krishna struggled in his career, taking four wickets in 324 balls in the Powerplay. He dismissed Virat Kohli on the second night but then gave back-to-back no-balls.
The troublesome thing for Kolkata is that they have Lockie Ferguson in their team, but they could not bring him in the team because his batting was so bad. So they kept picking Cummins - who dismissed Morgan before the season break - and Narine, who still only has 31 runs from six innings - which meant either Ferguson or Tim Southee couldn't get a game.
There were other options. One, Andre Russell had to feed his entire quota, which is risky. But it would allow him to leave Cummins, although doing so is often an issue for a high-paid player when it comes to team dynamics. The other was to leave Morgan. Had he not been the captain, perhaps he would have done so.
He was the anchor for both of these players for the first half of the season.
Morgan's captaincy was not a problem in deciding when and what to do at the toss. Like any captain, he'll get something right or wrong, and you'd expect an experienced leader to be an overall plus. It was about the design of the team, and the fact that his location - because he was the captain - was part of the issue.
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Morgan won the World Cup and so people will see him as a great captain. Does it do this?
To put it another way: Was Steve Waugh a better captain than Heath Streak? If Streak was given to lead Australia, and Waugh Zimbabwe, I think we would see Streak more on the list of greatest captains than Waugh.
There's no proper way to know how good a captain is outside of a win-loss record, and how many victories are really worth the leadership. Captains make up 9% of a cricket team, but they make a lot of decisions, and T20 has more per ball than any other format.
More often than not, they have to use their main five bowlers, perhaps hitting a six. Circumstances often dictate how this is done, and most bowlers have already determined roles in the team. Not only in terms of match-ups, but as different bowlers struggle at different stages of the game, the order in which they are used obviously has a huge impact. We have algorithms that can tell us the optimal bowling strategy for each over, but they also can't tell us about dew, lack of confidence or wind.
Setting up the field is another big part, although you can't discount how often the captain follows the ball or lets the bowlers choose the field. Then there are all the things we may never know, like how supporting players changed them, and how not doing so changed them as well.
There are very few terrible captains. You will see the new leaders struggle with over-rates and remembering bowling plans. But most professional captains are at least capable. It's just that outside of winning and losing, it's hard to judge the good from the bad.
Think about it this way: The players you field have about 90% of their chances of winning. The remaining 10% is affected by your captaincy, weather, toss and pitch conditions. It would be silly to say that captaincy doesn't matter, but when you take into account all the things that one does in cricket, it shows how little a captain can influence a match.
We don't really have great metrics to track bowling changes or to keep a record of fielding changes and how they affect each game. So whatever decision we take on captaincy is anecdotal. We remember bad decisions in defeat and best decisions in victory. But we all know deep down that a bad captain with a great team will beat a great captain with a bad team. We just forget about that when our team has lost three in a row.
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Ben Stokes has been at the center of two of Morgan's most famous moments as England captain.
The first was the ruined last over of the 2016 T20 World Cup final. Stokes bowled the first poor delivery and then missed his length for three consecutive yorkers and Carlos Brathwaite played four exceptional shots.
England started that match very poorly. Morgan was in a hurry and Samuel Badree scratched around before confusing him with the wrong 'un. Joe Root, Jos Buttler and David Willey saved him and he was dismissed for 155.
Morgan bowled the second over Root, which was probably a plan for Chris Gayle - and it worked. But Root also dismissed Johnson Charles. Root had opened the bowling for England once before but was a close specialist for Yorkshire. Of the 30 matches in which he bowled for them, he made his bowling debut in 14 (and they were almost all before 2016). England remained on top for the rest of the innings.
There is nothing notable in this. If Root had bowled, had not taken a wicket, and the over had gone for seven runs, this call would have been as good or as bad, just we would have forgotten it.
England had four seamers, Liam Plunkett, Willie, Stokes and Chris Jordan. Death specialist Jordan was always going to get two overs at the pointy end. Plunkett was the middle overs bowler, so he was allotted. This meant that England had to be put to death with Willie and Stokes. Willie on 18th, Jordan 17th and 19th, to keep England ahead of the pace, and nearly 19 runs to get West Indies from the final over.
Using Jordan to raise that rate in the 19th was a good move, and it worked. It's good captaincy, but also something that was pretty common in the game for a while. This allowed the batting all-rounder to have easy overs when the conditions were in his favour.
Coming into this game, Stokes had bowled 199 balls in the last four overs of an innings in T20. In this, his bowling average was 14.66 and economy rate was 7.95. It's not too much of a ball, but that wasn't new. About a fifth of those balls were for England, and they had an economy of 7.12 there. His death overs were messy, but his inability to get the ball exactly where he wanted it at good pace worked for him compared to other bowlers who had a lot of planning. It didn't work out here, and in a game that Morgan captained well, he lost.
You wouldn't say that Morgan led poorly in the 2019 World Cup final. New Zealand lost regular wickets, Morgan defended short boundaries, and New Zealand's 241 seemed to be equal (or exactly equal in this case). For a batting side like England, it was an excellent result, despite the kind of surface on which they set their ODI record. But he didn't bat well, Morgan failed again, and he was saved by Stokes in the face of his bat - as well as, in the end, behind it. Morgan got the CBE to win this World Cup, but he was no better or worse than the loser in this final. The difference was how good Stokes was.
But Morgan isn't worth those two matches or the semi-finals of the Champions Trophy they lost to Pakistan. This is how England, between the 2015 and 2019 World Cups, dominated white-ball cricket. He won almost two-thirds of his ODI matches in this period.
Morgan's skills help the team create a system and game plan to perform well. But when you are made captain in the middle of a season, and then there is no mega auction, how can you do that? In the 2015 World Cup, England were not using Jonny Bairstow, Adil Rashid, Jason Roy or even Stokes. Nor did Morgan put him on the bench for KKR.
Morgan will not be around for four years for KKR. Over time, his strengths may come to the fore, but that's hard to change within a league designed with salary caps and auctions in mind, with a sense of equality. KKR have won 50% of their games since winning the title in 2014. He doesn't have many losing seasons, he just has a mediocre record. And sometimes it's hard to fix.
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Is Morgan a top-class T20 batsman - enough to be among the top 12-14 overseas batsmen to get a spot in the IPL team? His international statistics certainly suggest that: an average of 28.7 with a 138 strike rate.
But he has never been that player in the IPL. Starting in 2010, he has averaged 23.37 and averaged 123.89. Those numbers aren't great, but he bats at four and five, where the batsmen's stats are usually sad. Those positions combined have a record average of 27.8 and a strike rate of 129 in the IPL (since 2010). Meaning Morgan has been below par, although he has played eight seasons and 76 games as an overseas player.
When you look at him season after season, he has had one season where he averaged over 30 and one where he scored at a strike rate of over 130. They take place in the same season: 2020. Kolkata gave him the captaincy for the only time. He was batting above average in IPL. Now he is back to normal, which causes a big problem.
Some overseas players are automatic selections in the IPL, and they can be a safe selection as captains. But if you are not an automatic pick like Rashid Khan or AB de Villiers, there can be a lot of change in the overseas players. Form, injury and availability of local players also affect the ability of foreign players to play. You need to make sure that every game will require your foreign player. And even then it can be wrong. This season we have seen David Warner lose his place and leadership at Sunrisers. Warner is also not such a risky option as a captain; He is a true IPL great, while Morgan is a replacement level talent, and he rarely plays for a full year unless there is no other option.
The reason it is difficult is not just the form, but how the team comes together.
Russell is an automatic pick, but around him, Kolkata was always going to bite and change. By the time their international matches caught fire, Ferguson and Cummins could have been intertwined, Narine and Shakib were already there, and so could Morgan be replaced by Ben Cutting or Shakib. Often foreign players are left out more on the basis of how the domestic player is doing. So you need that flexibility.
If Morgan was just an overseas player in the first half of this season when his form was on the decline, he could try Venkatesh Iyer, allowing him to bring in Ferguson and Cummins. Rana would have fallen (at four or five) in place of Morgan, where he has a record average of 32.38 and a strike rate of 132. No one knew Iyer would have such an immediate impact, but it looks like a better team even if it looks like a better team. Iyer failed.
Despite Cummins being there without Iyer and Morgan, the trick is working for the five bowlers.
They have gone with Russell bowling his full quota with no real back-up, apart from a few occasional fingers from Rana. This means they lose a front-line bowler, and Russell has to bowl at death. There he has a lot of wickets but he scores more than two runs off a ball. But it allows them an extra batsman, and luckily for them, Iyer, and so suddenly everything is turning purple.
Still, the bowling is thin, and the best option for Russell would be to do real cover with another all-rounder like Cutting or Shakib, both of whom can bat at five or six if needed. And that player has to come for Morgan.
KKR have won a few games now, but their approach is at risk. It all hinges on the fact that the player he will not replace is Morgan, a specialist batsman who has averaged 11.88 this year with a strike rate of 101.
So let's know on the reasons behind Morgan becoming the captain of Kolkata. He is incredibly respected as a leader despite not being a captain. This is one of the reasons why he has had such a long career in IPL although he never clicked with the bat. He had a leadership crisis last year, and that's where he had an international captain. He was scoring runs - higher than his previous three seasons - at an average of 42 and a strike rate of 138. and have an emotional connection; Not only is one of his best friends a coach, but Morgan has been a KKR player for a long time.
His captaincy feels like a combination of crisis, batting form and personal relationships. It basically tells you that there were some issues even before he became the captain. His captaincy - even if it works - is part of a bigger problem that even finding a little bit of form with the bat probably won't go well.
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Kolkata is looking much better since the restart. Previously, they were dumpers waiting for a lit match; Since then, it's been three out of four, and they went within a ball of winning them all.
His four matches were different. In the win over RCB, Famous took one of his few Powerplay wickets and Ferguson took another. Russell took the wicket in the middle, bowled that over without Cummins and Chakraborty also dominated in that period. He didn't have to worry about death bowling because of all his wickets, and his batsmen chasing low scores.
In the victory over Mumbai Indians, he could not take a single wicket in the powerplay. The famous gamble didn't work. Russell went on to score again, but the other three bowlers were so good that they kept the total in the middle. And for the second straight game, Iyer put him on a flyer. The rest of the batsmen supported him.
In the third game, versus CSK, it was the batting as a unit that gave them a lot. But Prasad got out after scoring a run. He was injured before Russell too did, and Morgan had to assemble a death line-up on the fly, with Iyer bowling his first IPL over and Narine almost saving four runs in the last over.
When he took on the Capitals, he didn't have Russell, which meant his batting was weak, and Ferguson then got injured in the middle of the match. Iyer stepped up with the ball and Rana played a great knock on the boundary and Kolkata went on to win.
Morgan batted in three matches. His top score among them was eight.
Cummins extended his hand with the selection, and Iyer is the kind of gift no one could believe would be useful. Looks like they have given him more batting and bowling. They will continue to gamble on Russell's overs because of Iyer. Everything is looking good outside Morgan's batting form.
They are winning now. So is Morgan a better captain now than ever? Did he go and take magic lead pills? Clearly helping a broken team they were given time to assess how they could improve. Their last three games are against teams below them on the table, so they can also finish third. But chances are they are still going to end up somewhere between fourth and sixth. And where they end up will control fan anger, but, as before, it probably won't have much to do with Morgan's ability to captain.