Leg and off: Should KKR retain Shreyas Iyer ahead of IPL 2025 auction? 

There aren't many other teams in the Indian Premier League (IPL) that would have been debating whether to retain their captain, who led them to the title in 2024, or not for the 2025 auction. But such is the cut-throat competition in the league that the Kolkata Knight Riders (KKR) or any of their opponents can just not rest on their laurels.

So, with Shreyas Iyer, they are caught in an interesting position. He is, as a batter, not one of their best T20 players and is perhaps not among the top six, which is the maximum number of retentions allowed. However, cricket is a game that's played as much with numbers and logic as with instinct and emotion.

Below, we discuss why KKR can think of letting Shreyas Iyer go.

The biggest 'con' for KKR in retaining Shreyas is the price. As the captain who won the title last year, the franchise would have to shell out the highest salary slab, ₹18 crore, because anything less for the team leader generally doesn't look good.

The question they would ask themselves here would be: does Shreyas make it to KKR's best 11 as a batter? IPL 2024 was, in many ways, a successful season for him; he scored just over 350 runs but his strike rate of 146.86 was his IPL best.

Still, if you look at KKR as a whole, he was one of the slowest. A deeper look at his innings last year would remind you that he often started his knocks slowly before accelerating at the end -- it's not a bad T20 quality, but most of those knocks came when KKR were already dominating with a run-rate over 10.

Shreyas's batting position wasn't fixed and he often came out to bat at times when the team could've used the likes of Rinku Singh and Ramandeep Singh. The skipper was an anchor-like player in a big-hitting team who floated as a finisher.

It was a slightly uneasy situation to look at, though KKR's robustness cushioned most of the impact. Now, it's on the owners and the management to make that call: if they think the best team is one with the best T20 players and a captain is chosen from one of them, then they might have to reconsider keeping Shreyas.

There's a world where KKR retain Andre Russell, Rinku Singh, Varun Chakaravarthy, Sunil Narine, Harshit Rana, and Venkatesh Iyer ahead of Shreyas, just because, purely from a T20 perspective, they are better players. Shreyas is one of India's best in ODIs but the jury is still out on his T20 skills.

A decision like that would require a lot of courage, conviction over a new captain and patience to cope with the criticism that'll come the team's way.

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Why Shreyas Iyer is crucial to KKR's success

Now, even if Shreyas is not one of the best T20 batters in India, he can't be discounted as one of India's best T20 captains. 12 of the 17 IPL titles have been won by three players; for a new player to win it, they have to be extremely skilled.

Shreyas is someone who doesn't make the basic mistakes on the field -- which is all you can ask from a captain in T20s. Last year, with MS Dhoni's stepping down, he was also the most experienced IPL captain in the league.

We can't also forget how admirably he led the Delhi Capitals (DC) when the franchise was in a crisis after Gautam Gambhir's mid-season resignation in 2018. Under him, the team made it to their first and only runners-up finish in 2020.

Still, when he was injured for the first half of the next season, DC stuck with interim captain Rishabh Pant for the next season and Shreyas played as a batter. They made it to the playoffs that year but haven't done that for three years since.

As much as the role of a captain has been decreased in T20s, the psychological impact on a team under a proven leader, the motivation and support a captain can give behind the scenes is still pretty important. Shreyas won't be wrong to demand the top dollar from the team because he'd bring these qualities.

Finding new captains every couple of years is never good for an IPL franchise. Moreover, it's not even easy to get a good captain who can align himself to the team, the owners, and the fans' vision straight after coming from the auction.

And in a mega-auction year, successful franchises would be looking for as much stability as possible. Shreyas gives that to KKR in a year where they have already lost three coaches and would have to release more than half of their squad.

Stability, no-nonsense captaincy and an aligned vision would come at a price for KKR but in the chase of a second consecutive title, you do whatever it takes.