IPL 2018: Kolkata Knight Riders Squad For The Upcoming Season

The mega-auction for the upcoming season of the Indian Premier League finally concluded on Sunday in Bangalore, and it justified the hype surrounding it. With the majority of the players available in the auction pool, the franchises went neck to neck to build the strongest possible squads. At the same time, just like the past times, the recently-concluded auction also threw a lot of surprises.

While Jaydev Unadkat becoming the most expensive Indian player in this year’s auction should not come as a surprise considering his sensational performance last season, the likes of Joe Root, Eoin Morgan and many other notable names going unsold certainly left a lot of people surprised. In fact, Chris Gayle, the most decorated batsman in the history of T20 cricket, was looking destined to go unsold before being bought at his base price of INR 2 crore by Kings XI Punjab towards the fag end of the auction.

Coming to the major figures of this year’s auction, out of 578 players, only 169 were sold. 113 of the sold players are Indians while the remaining 56 are overseas. Unadkat became the most expensive Indian player after being bought by Rajasthan Royals for a whopping amount of INR 11.5 crore while Ben Stokes once again became the most expensive overseas player after being bought by the same franchise for INR 12.5 crore.

Now that the auction is done and dusted we are taking a look at the squad of two-time Indian Premier League champions Kolkata Knight Riders. The Kolkata-based franchise had retained the West Indian duo of Andre Russell and Sunil Narine and went on to re-sign Chris Lynn, Robin Uthappa, Piyush Chawla and Kuldeep Yadav to keep the core of the team intact.

To bolster their pace attack, they secured the services of Australia pace spearhead Mitchell Starc by shelling a whopping amount of INR 9 crore and also signed up Dinesh Karthik and Nitish Rana to bolster their middle-order.  The Knight Riders also invested for the future by signing India’s Under-19 stars Kamlesh Nagarkotti, Shivam Mavi and Shubman Gill.

So here is the full squad: