Sourav Ganguly’s IPL career got off to a poor start as he captained the Kolkata Knight Riders (KKR) franchise to sixth finish in 2008.
He was removed from the captaincy of the KKR for the 2009 season of IPL, and was replaced by Brendon McCullum. The move was questioned by the fans and media, when KKR finished at the bottom of the ranking table with three wins and ten losses.
Ganguly returned as KKR skipper for the 2010 edition but the team once again ended at the sixth position and the franchise decided not to retain him for the following season.
The decision had received a lot of flak by Kolkata fans who were unable to imagine that their hometown hero would be playing for another franchise in the tournament.
KKR CEO Venky Mysore, who joined the franchise after the 2010 season, recently recalled how the decision to drop Ganguly was tough for him as well as the owners.
“I’ll break that down into two parts. Personally, for me, it didn’t see like a big decision (not retaining Sourav Ganguly), only because I was unattached. If I had been part of the organisation for three years, or two years or one year, it would have been a tougher decision,” Mysore said in the latest episode of ‘The RK show’ uploaded on Youtube.
“This was like someone completely coming in from the outside, which I was, literally from the outside. Eventually, I realised, that for the organisation and for the owners, it was tough. It’s a decision and an approach that I proposed as I was given the mandate,” he added.
“I look back at it, and I basically said this, that ‘I don’t know if it’s the right thing or do or not, and we may fall flat on our face. But, it’s a different approach. Are we all on board with this?’ If I have to attribute whatever success we have had to one thing, it is the fact that the owners - Shah Rukh, Jay, Juhi - have stood behind the decisions I have proposed.
“I am not a complete lone-ranger maverick who runs off and wants to do my own thing. But at the same time, my entire career, I was used to being given the autonomy to operate, to also be accountable at the same time. I used to report to boards,” he continued.
“But it could easily have been a micro-managing kind of situation, or second-guessing the decisions I have made, or saying that ‘yeah, but we made those announcements, but let’s not do that’. But they stood completely behind me. That is why they took a lot of flak for that and heat. As an organisation, it was tougher for them. But to be perfectly honest, it was not that tougher for me to make that decision,” Mysore further explained.
The decision of KKR management turned out to be a productive one as the team began a new journey under Gautam Gambhir and went on to lift the IPL title in 2012 and 2014.
