With the eight edition of the Indian Premier League (IPL8) is scheduled to start on April 8 2015, defending champions Kolkata Knight Riders (KKR) have threatened to pull out of the tournament if there star bowler Sunil Narine is not cleared by the Board of Control for Cricket in India (BCCI).
Sunil Narine wasn’t allowed to participate in the Champions League t20 (CLT20) last year after being reported for suspect action twice in his last two matches.
While Narine has now got his action cleared from the ICC-approved biomechanical assessment centre in Loughborough, the BCCI, refusing to accept the report, remains firm on its stand that the bowler will be cleared only if he undergoes another test in one of its centres, at Chennai. This has led to the KKR thinking that their key player is being targeted.
KC Cariappa: India’s New Mystery Spinner
KKR are going in with an all-spin attack in IPL8. KKR bought a young Karnataka mystery spinner KC Cariappa in this year’s auction and they already have Kuldeep Yadav and Piyush Chawla in their squad. Sunil Narine is undoubtedly the most important in KKR’s line-up and his presence will surely make them one of the favourites to win the tournament.
While welcoming the suspect action clean-up, KKR’s skipper Gautam Gambhir had said last year that he felt that the board was specifically targeting certain players. Incidentally, the first match that Narine missed out after being suspended was against the Super Kings – a franchise owned by the then BCCI president N Srinivasan.
The KKR management believes that Narine shouldn’t be forced to undergo another test, as the ICC has cleared his action. BCCI president Jagmohan Dalmiya is expected to take a call on this issue in a day or two.
