The numbers looked ordinary on paper: 4–0–29–2. Yet those four overs from Sunil Narine – in a match that produced 465 runs – were enough for Ambati Rayudu to roll out the superlative. “Sunil Narine is the ‘best IPL player, according to me. [Of] all time,’” he declared on ESPNcricinfo’s TimeOut show, shortly after Kolkata Knight Riders had beaten Gujarat Titans by 29 runs.
Rayudu, who has seen plenty of quality in his own 15-season career, wasn’t bluffing. “Proper match-winner with the ball, [and] with the bat,” he said. “There have been such great players in the IPL, but this guy always stands out. He’s on the top of the list for me.”
Alongside him, Sanjay Bangar offered a cooler assessment, though the admiration was obvious. Narine, he felt, belongs “in my top five” and is quite simply “a legend of the league”. Bangar pointed to longevity, adaptability and that still-mysterious craft. “He had had to also overcome a lot of other problems in terms of how his action was questioned on many occasions, but he seems to have found another way of delivering with the same overspin … retaining the ability to get the ball turning both ways. And that puts massive doubts in the batter’s mind.”
The raw data back them up. Narine’s 205 wickets put him behind only Yuzvendra Chahal (230) and Bhuvneshwar Kumar (220) on the IPL’s all-time list. No overseas player has appeared more often; all 200 caps have been in KKR colours since his debut season in 2012, when he helped the franchise to their first title with 24 wickets at 5.47. He repeated the trick in 2014 (21 wickets at 6.35) and again during the 2024 triumph (17 at 6.69). This year he is operating at 6.79; never has he finished a season above eight.
To Bangar, Saturday’s economy rate of 7.25 scarcely raised an eyebrow. “These are regulation figures for him. He has not done anything extraordinary, he has just done what he does on a regular basis.”
Off camera, the pair swapped memories of facing Narine. Bangar asked Rayudu – 175 matches for Mumbai Indians and Chennai Super Kings – what the plan had been. “He [Rayudu] said that he tended to bat defensively against him, those ones and twos were the ways to go,” Bangar recalled. “But there have been instances where people have tried to slog-sweep him, play off the back foot through the off side, but nobody has actually taken him down in the manner in which the other spinners, some great spinners, have [been dominated] in the past.”
That, in short, is Narine’s trick: he forces good players to settle for survival. On nights when most bowlers are flogged, he still walks away with two for not-many and a shrug. Even at 37, the aura holds.
Whether Rayudu’s “best of all time” verdict convinces everyone hardly matters. Narine remains near-automatic at the top of any IPL greatness debate, and as long as he turns his arm over for KKR, that debate is not closing any time soon.
