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Kolkata Knight Riders mentor Gautam Gambhir believes that the Indian Premier League has become much more competitive than international T20I cricket in today's modern era.
Gambhir returned to the KKR side as a mentor last year in November. Before that, he was with Lucknow Super Giants in the IPL 2021 and 2022, performing the same role. Talking about his IPL career, the southpaw has played for the Delhi Capitals and KKR. He has won two IPL titles as a skipper with the Knight Riders in 2012 and 2014. The 42-year-old asserted that international cricket was far tougher than franchise cricket earlier, but in today's time, the tables have turned, and now IPL has become tougher than T20Is. "International cricket was far more tougher than franchise cricket. But today, when I look back or probably the later half of my career in franchise cricket, I thought franchise cricket became much tougher than the international T20 format, especially the IPL. I don't know about the other leagues because if you see in the first three or four years when you play an international game, you're literally facing five or six top-quality bowlers. But, when it comes to IPL in the first couple of years when the standard was not as good as it is now, you could always target two or three domestic bowlers," Gambhir said on Ravichandran Ashwin's YouTube channel. The former cricketer further stated that for batters, it is far easier to get runs in franchise cricket compared to international T20 cricket. "For a batter, it is far more easier to get runs in franchise cricket as compared to international cricket. Today when I look at international T20 sites, apart from two or three sites, I don't see that there is enough competition when it comes to playing for India. Not many teams can match the quality what India has. So, I feel in today's day and age, I think IPL has become far more competitive than international T20 cricket," the former left-hand opener added. Gambhir's KKR will play for a spot in the final when they take on Sunrisers Hyderabad (SRH) in Qualifier 1 on Tuesday at the Narendra Modi Stadium in Ahmedabad. Kolkata Knight Riders squad: Shreyas Iyer (c), Nitish Rana, Rinku Singh, Rahmanullah Gurbaz, Jason Roy, Andre Russell, Sunil Narine, Venkatesh Iyer, Anukul Roy, Suyash Sharma, Harshit Rana, Varun Chakravarthy, Vaibhav Arora, KS Bharat, Chetan Sakariya, Mitchell Starc, Ramandeep Singh, Angrish Raghuvanshi, Sherfane Rutherford, Manish Pandey, Mujeeb Ur Rahman, Gus Atkinson, Sakib Hussain. (ANI)
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