In the 2020 IPL auctions, Kolkata Knight Riders bought two world-class players from Australia and England- Eoin Morgan and Pat Cummins. With the inclusion of both these players, the franchise now looks a lot balanced than the previous edition.
However, both of them are currently playing in the ongoing ODI series between England and Australia. The final match of the series will take place on 16th September 2020. The IPL 2020, on the other hand, will begin on 19th September 2020.
Given that all the players need to serve a mandatory six-day quarantine period upon reaching UAE, both Morgan and Cummins might not play KKR’s first couple of games in the tournament. However, the franchise’s CEO, Venky Mysore recently revealed that both the players can take part right from the first match of KKR as they will be travelling from one bio-security bubble to another.
Also, KKR will play their first match on 23rd September 2020. As a result, the players would have finished their quarantine period by then.
“What we did was put a plan together and shared it with the medical team at the IPL,” Mysore said. “We told them, ‘they’re in a bio-secure bubble in UK. What if we brought them on a sanitised charter flight and we took care of all the elements of immigration, testing, contactless stuff and everything to allow them to come right into a bubble here?’ To give credit to IPL, they took it very constructively and they have a written Standard Operating Procedure (SOP) for that, which says if you’re coming from a bubble to another bubble, you don’t need the mandatory quarantine period.”
Kolkata Knight Riders will play their first game of IPL 2020 against Chennai Super Kings on 23rd September 2020.
Full squad: Andre Russell, Dinesh Karthik, Harry Gurney, Kamlesh Nagarkoti, Kuldeep Yadav, Lockie Ferguson, Nitish Rana, Prasidh Krishna, Rinku Singh, Sandeep Warrier, Shivam Mavi, Shubman Gill, Siddhesh Lad, Sunil Narine, Pat Cummins, Eoin Morgan, Varun Chakravarthy, Tom Banton, Rahul Tripathi, Chris Green, M Siddharth, Praveen Tambe, Nikhil Naik
