The year of 250: KKR win a third title in the season scoring broke

For six weeks the 2024 Indian Premier League was a batting carnival — 250 became a routine target, boundaries stopped feeling like events, and a bowler’s economy of nine an over counted as a good day. Then the final arrived, and the whole thing flipped. Kolkata Knight Riders did not out-slug anybody. They strangled the tournament’s most destructive batting line-up and won going away.

The most lopsided final the IPL had staged

At the M. A. Chidambaram Stadium in Chennai on 26 May, KKR beat Sunrisers Hyderabad by 8 wickets. Sunrisers, the side that had spent the season rewriting the record books, were bowled out for 113 — the lowest total in any IPL final. Kolkata knocked off the runs at a canter, reaching 114 for 2 with 57 balls to spare, Venkatesh Iyer unbeaten on a 26-ball half-century.

The tone was set inside the first over. Mitchell Starc, KKR’s most expensive-ever buy, produced what many in the ground called the ball of the tournament to remove Abhishek Sharma, and finished with 2 for 14. He was named Player of the Match — the second time in a week he had taken SRH apart, having already ripped through their top order in Qualifier 1. For a signing that had been questioned for much of the league phase, the timing could not have been better.

It was Kolkata’s third title, after 2012 and 2014, and their first under Shreyas Iyer’s captaincy with Gautam Gambhir returned as mentor. They had topped the table, beaten Sunrisers in Qualifier 1 and then done it again when it mattered most — a rare season in which the best team over the long haul was also the last one standing.

The reinvention of Sunil Narine

If one man embodied Kolkata’s transformation, it was Sunil Narine. Long feared as a mystery spinner and used as a pinch-hitting novelty, Narine was handed the opener’s role permanently in 2024 and turned it into the season’s best value proposition. He made 488 runs at a strike rate above 180, including the maiden century of his career — 109 off 56 balls against Rajasthan Royals in April — and still took 17 wickets at an economy under 7.

That double act earned him the tournament’s Most Valuable Player award, an honour he had also won in 2012 and 2018, making him the only man to claim it three times. A bowler who had once been reported for his action and rebuilt it from scratch was now the most complete cricketer in the competition.

A season the scoreboard could barely hold

The final’s low scores were the exception that proved the rule. 2024 was, statistically, the most prolific season in IPL history, and Sunrisers were its engine.

• On 15 April in Bengaluru, SRH posted 287 for 3 against Royal Challengers Bengaluru — the highest total in IPL history, built on a 39-ball hundred from Travis Head and a 30-ball 67 from Heinrich Klaasen.
• RCB’s reply of 262 for 7 was the highest score ever to lose a T20, and the match’s aggregate of 549 runs was the most in the format’s history.
• 200-plus totals, once a talking point, became close to a weekly occurrence.

Much of the inflation traced back to the Impact Player rule, introduced in 2023 and in full effect here. By letting sides swap in a specialist batter for a bowler mid-match, it effectively gave every team a deeper batting order and licensed even harder hitting through the middle overs. Purists grumbled that the balance between bat and ball had tilted too far — a debate the record books of 2024 only sharpened.

Why the champions were different

The lesson of the 2024 season was that in a summer built for batting, the title still went to the team that could bowl. Kolkata had the pace of Starc and Harshit Rana, the guile of Narine and Varun Chakravarthy, and enough top-order firepower to chase down whatever the era demanded. When the noise of 287s and 262s finally died away, it was a total of 113 — and the attack that produced it — that decided who lifted the trophy.