Kuldeep Yadav, the KKR spin bowler, has slammed the team’s management and captain Eoin Morgan for mistreating him. The left-arm chinaman bowler has only appeared on a few occasions for the two-time winners, with skipper Eoin Morgan preferring to rely on the talents of Sunil Narine and Varun Chakravarthy. What irritates Yadav is the team captain’s and management’s lack of communication, according to him.
Kuldeep Yadav isn’t sure what the future holds for him when he returns to the Kolkata Knight Riders (KKR) for the second phase of the Indian Premier League (IPL). He has yet to appear in a single game for the team in the IPL 2021 season. Kuldeep, who isn’t regarded as one of the team’s key spinners, admits to being perplexed by the team’s lack of communication, particularly that of skipper Eoin Morgan.
Kuldeep’s career has taken a drastic turn from being one of the best spinners in the world in white-ball cricket to failing to secure a single game in the IPL for his club. While the spinner was aiming to earn a berth in India’s T20 World Cup squad with a strong performance for the Knight Riders, he did not appear in any of the team’s seven games this season.
Kuldeep Yadav on Eoin Morgan and KKR Management
Yadav, 26, bemoaned the lack of communication within the squad in a video interview on former India cricketer Aakash Chopra’s YouTube channel, saying that there are instances when a player does not understand why he is not being chosen.
“If the coaches have worked with you before and are with you for a prolonged period of time, they understand you better. But it becomes very difficult when the communication is weak. Sometimes you don’t even know that whether you will be playing or not, or what the team expects from you. Sometimes you feel that you are deserving to play, can win matches for the team, but you don’t know the reason why you are not playing. The management comes for 2 months with their plans, so that makes it difficult,” Kuldeep said.
While Yadav was surprised to be benched so frequently during the past two editions, he was upset with the team’s lack of trust in his abilities. When Kuldeep is not playing, he finds it tough to communicate with an overseas captain. If it had been an Indian captain, he would have approached him and questioned why he had been ignored for so long.
“In the Indian team they talk to you when you are not selected, but it does not happen in the IPL,” Kuldeep Yadav said. “I remember that I had spoken to the franchise before the IPL but in the matches that happened in the middle, nobody gave me an explanation. I was a bit shocked. I felt like there was no trust like they had no faith in my skill. This happens when the team has many options. KKR now has plenty of spin bowling options,” he added.
Morgan took over as KKR captain from Dinesh Karthik in the middle of last season, but the 2019 ODI World Cup winner hasn’t been able to make the kind of impact that the management had hoped for. Morgan’s view of Kuldeep as a player is unknown to him, according to Kuldeep.
“I don’t know how Eoin Morgan sees me. In such cases, the communication gap increases. When it’s an Indian, you can literally walk up to them and ask why you are not playing. Suppose, Rohit Sharma is the captain, you can ask freely on ways to improve, what’s my role in the team but most importantly, the captain should also be interested in what he expects from me,” Yadav concluded.
