Sunil Narine, Rinku Singh, Harshit Rana Andre Russell, Ramandeep Singh and Varun Chakravarthy are the six players who have been retained by three-time IPL winners Kolkata Knight Riders (KKR) ahead of the IPL 2025 mega auction. Narine's retention was a no-brainer for the reigning IPL champions as the West Indian showcased a brilliant all-round performance in the previous season.
Narine was amazing with the bat in hand during IPL 2024 as he aggregated 458 runs in 15 games including one century and three fifties. The southpaw scored his runs at a strike rate of 180.74 and was the one to set the tone for the team from the outset.
Notably, Kolkata Knight Riders have announced Rinku Singh as their top retention. KKR have decided to pay Rinku 13 crore. Varun Chakravarthy, Sunil Narine and Andre Russell have been retained for 12 crore each.
Fast bowler Harshit Rana and Ramandeep Singh are the two uncapped players retained by Kolkata Knight Riders ahead of the mega auction. Rana bagged 19 wickets for Kolkata Knight Riders in the previous season at an economy rate of 9.08.
As for Ramandeep, he recently represented India A at the ACC Men's T20 Emerging Teams Asia Cup in Muscat, Oman and was one of the top performers for the team. KKR are only the second team to have retained six players apart from Rajasthan Royals ahead of the mega auction.
KKR's list of retained players: Sunil Narine (12 crore), Rinku Singh (13 crore), Harshit Rana (4 crore), Andre Russell (12 crore), Ramandeep Singh (4 crore) and Varun Chakravarthy (12 crore)
KKR's list of released players:
Shreyas Iyer (c), Venkatesh Iyer, Nitish Rana, Manish Pandey, Anukul Roy, Suyash Sharma, Vaibhav Arora, KS Bharat, Chetan Sakariya, Angkrish Raghuvanshi, Sakib Hussain, Rahmanullah Gurbaz, Phil Salt, Mitchell Starc, Sherfane Rutherford, Dushmantha Chameera, Allah Ghazanfar
