KKR of IPL 2024 - a "total cricket" team without a weakness

"What he means is that everyone compliments the other players in the team... He makes us play as one."

This is not something that Shreyas Iyer said. Or Gautam Gambhir, Chandrakant Pandit, Abhishek Nayar, Bharat Arun. Or anyone even remotely associated with Kolkata Knight Riders (KKR), the newly-minted IPL 2024 champions.

This was Bas de Leede, the brilliant Netherlands all-rounder, said in an interview with The Guardian in September 2023. He was speaking about how the Dutch men's coach, Ryan Cook, tries to utilize a strategy similar to, but not exactly, "total football", a tactical system designed by the legendary coach, Johan Cruyff.

Cook used that to get the Netherlands punch above its weight in the 2023 ODI World Cup in India by making sure that contributions to the team came from everywhere - tailenders scoring important runs, batters trying to give the bowlers more cushion than other teams with their fielding, and so on.

In the same country, eight months later, KKR presented their version of "total cricket" by decimating SunRisers Hyderabad in just over 10 overs in Chepauk. But when the coming generations look back to the team, the iconic factor to find won't be the twos, the catches or the cameos, but a simple, sodden, flying kiss.

For those who don't know, the flying kiss became a hot topic when KKR pacer Harshit Rana gave one to Mayank Agarwal after taking his and the team's first wicket in IPL 2024. He was fined for that "celebration/send-off".

Later, he gave a "get out" gesture after taking a wicket against Delhi Capitals and was seen pulling out of another flying kiss at the last moment. But the authorities handed him a one-match ban for another breach of conduct.

So when Shah Rukh Khan made the whole team, the support staff, and his family and friends do it together in Chepauk, it wasn't a joke, nor was it a dig at the men in suits who found it self-affirming to ban a 22-year-old for showing passion.

It was what Cruyff and Cook talked about in those Dutch dressing rooms in different languages and words - it was team members and their families aligned as one, from ages 60 to 16, with the sum of its parts greater than the whole.

How KKR used "total cricket"

For ages, after every auction, KKR were defined as a team with a competitive first 11 but not good enough backups. It was the same in 2024. However, for the first time in around a decade, they made it work.

In terms of stability of the playing 11, they were only behind Rajasthan Royals. Good fortune with injuries helped but more important was the squad construction.

In the final, KKR had a batting line-up with Harshit Rana, who averages 49 in first-class cricket, coming at No. 9 and seven bowling options in the first innings, excluding guys like Ramandeep Singh and Shreyas who can bowl too.

As a result, they became only the second team after Lucknow Super Giants to play two games without using an Impact Player in 2024. The first time they did it was also against SRH, in the first Qualifier. For all the talk about Impact Player making the IPL a 12v12 contest, KKR won their two most important games with 11.

A team has taken 110 or more wickets in an IPL season only 13 times in history. No team has done in as few as 14 games like KKR in 2024. That makes it 7.86 wickets every game on average, which blows the second-best, Gujarat Titans (GT)'s 7.41 wickets per game in 2023 out of the water.

KKR didn't win the Purple Cap but they had five players in the top-20 wicket-takers for the first time in their history. The biggest testimony to the division of their roles was that Varun Chakaravarthy, their highest wicket-taker and the most in-form bowler, wasn't needed to bowl until the 12th over of SRH's innings in the final.

When they bowled SRH - remember, this is the side that made IPL 2024 what it was by notching record-breaking scores in the first half - for a paltry 113, it was the sixth time they took all 10 wickets this season. Royal Challengers Bengaluru (RCB) at three such performances were the next best, after one additional match.

SRH faced that demolition as the second-best batting team on most metrics for the season. The first were, of course, KKR. They didn't have any player in the top-three six or four-hitters in the season but as a team, they had by far the highest boundary percentage, with the second-placed Delhi Capitals not even close.

Roles are an important aspect of all cricket. But in this KKR team, in all three departments, the flexibility was in only the positioning, who'll bat where and who'll bowl where, while the roles and the mindset seemed the same.

Vaibhav Arora and Starc swing the new ball -- they had among the best powerplay averages; Harshit and Sunil Narine keep the runs down immediately after the powerplay - they had among the best economy rates; Chakaravarthy and Andre Russell are aggressive for wickets in the middle-overs - they were the top-ranked for Purple Cap. The blueprint was so good it could've been followed blindly.

How do you escape? Who do you attack? You don't.

The batting was known for short-ball issues. They solved that in the first few games and teams stopped trying. Despite having perhaps the best lower-order trio of Russell, Rinku Singh, and Ramandeep, KKR rarely needed them in a chase.

The only way you could put pressure on them was with a top-order collapse in the first innings, but then again, the depth of the bowling attack meant they could use an extra batter as the Impact Player without compromising the second innings.

Generally, such high-flying teams that look perfect on paper stumble, struggle, or at least get a fight in the Qualifiers when they face opposition chasing the same target with equal passion. But KKR pre-solved it by bringing in serial big-match winners like Starc, and Venkatesh Iyer, even if it meant overpaying a bit.

"We played like invincibles throughout the season," Shreyas said after the match. "There is so much to cherish right now. It is pleasing and the performance has been flawless throughout. I am running out of words. We have been tremendous right from game 1 and when we stepped up today. All we demanded was to back each other."

Invincible sounds about right. There have been good teams in the past but none has lost just three games in a season with a group stage net run rate as high as 1.428. Many have had an aura of inevitability but none have had such totality.

This team won't be remembered by the numbers. We are still in a time when stats threaten the idea of the "raw beauty" of the sport for some people, no matter how telling and accurate they are. So it would be remembered by that sodden flying kiss, which started it all through one player and ended it through a team.