Venkatesh Iyer

Venkatesh Iyer is a tall pace-bowling allrounder. He became very popular in white-ball cricket for India. Many saw him as a backup for Hardik Pandya before the 2021 and 2022 T20 World Cups.

But cricket was not his first love. He was once a bright student studying to become a Chartered Accountant. Later, he finished an MBA in finance and even got a job at Deloitte, a big accounting firm, in 2018. That year, he decided to leave the job and focus only on cricket.

He started playing white-ball cricket for Madhya Pradesh in 2015. His Ranji Trophy debut came in 2018. But his big breakthrough happened in the 2020-21 season. He scored two unbeaten knocks of 87 and 88 in the Syed Mushtaq Ali Trophy. He averaged nearly 76 and struck at almost 150. Then in the Vijay Hazare Trophy, he smashed 198 off 146 balls against Punjab. That Punjab attack included Sandeep Sharma, Siddarth Kaul, Harpreet Brar and Mayank Markande.

These strong performances earned him his first IPL contract with Kolkata Knight Riders in 2021. His base price was just 20 lakh rupees.

He scored 370 runs batting at the top of the order. Soon he was invited to the T20 World Cup in the UAE as a net bowler for the Indian team. After that World Cup, he got his T20I cap. He also made his ODI debut in South Africa in January 2022. KKR then kept him as one of their four main players for the 2022 season. His salary jumped 40 times to 8 crore rupees.

But his India career was not all smooth. He had to learn to bat as a finisher, especially in T20Is. He played some useful knocks at home in early 2022. Then his luck turned. He injured his ankle after falling down hotel stairs during the 2022-23 domestic season.

In 2023, he could only play as a batter. Thanks to the Impact Player rule in the IPL, he did not bowl a single ball but still had a great season with KKR. He even scored his first T20 century.

By the 2023-24 season, he was fully fit again. He scored nearly 550 runs in the Ranji Trophy and took wickets regularly across all formats. In KKR’s winning IPL run in 2024, he hit four half-centuries with a strike rate over 158. But he hardly got to bowl because his team already had many bowling options.