Shah Rukh Khan started his journey with Indian Premier League (IPL) with its first season as he bought the team Kolkata Knight Riders (KKR). The first few seasons were quite tough for KKR and while the team is now known for its three IPL wins, the start was so rocky that at one point, they had to change their entire team. And in trying to figure all of this out, Shah Rukh Khan and veteran cricketer Sourav Ganguly went through a rough patch that SRK once said, was like a divorce.
After the first three seasons of IPL, KKR was the only team that had not made it to the playoffs and so, Shah Rukh Khan and co-owner Jai Mehta decided to bring in CEO Venky Mysore to restructure the team an the first decision he made, was to change all the players, including the captain of the team – Sourav Ganguly. In a documentary made of the team, Living with KKR, Shah Rukh talked about this episode and said, “All these thoughts started coming in that maybe the format is not suiting the great players.”
Cricket commentator Gautam Bhattacharya spoke about the changing dynamic between Shah Rukh and Sourav as the team kept losing and how the two went from being united to gradually parting ways. “Shah Rukh and Sourav were similar characters – stormy, taking on the system, winning it on their own, very proud, self-made individuals,” he said and added, “In the process, communication between them had come down to quite an extent and towards the end of the tournament, Ganguly and Shah Rukh were no longer friends, let me put it this way.”
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Shah Rukh said that since they were not going to retain Sourav, they had to rehash the whole team. “If it’s not going to be Sourav leading KKR, then we will rehash the whole team. We were the only people who put the whole team back into the IPL pool. That was the only way we could show respect to the greatness and the beginnings that Sourav Ganguly gave us in KKR,” he said. He said that this was like a divorce, where things don’t work out between two individuals and they have to move on.
“Sometimes it’s better to just sit down and say you know what, this is not working out. Not because you are not good, not because I am not good, it’s like a divorce. Sometimes you say sweetheart, I hope you are happy and have a happier life and so will I, let’s just move on,” he said and acknowledged that in a way, Sourav paid the price for the problems at KKR. “How right it is for Sourav to have paid the price for the wrong that the whole system in KKR was, I don’t know,” he said.
The fourth season when KKR changed their whole team, they ended the season at the fourth spot out of the ten teams. KKR won its first IPL trophy in the fifth season in 2012. The franchise turned 18 this week.