5 IPL stars who were not successful with their first franchise

5) Chris Gayle – Kolkata Knight Riders (Now plays for Royal Challengers Bangalore)

Gayle’s IPL career turned on its head when he joined RCB.

To say that Chris Gayle was unsuccessful in a T20 tournament borders on blasphemy but if you look at the difference between his performances for Kolkata Knight Riders and Royal Challengers Bangalore, a strong case can be made. During the two seasons he was with KKR, Gayle was a shadow of the player he became at RCB and managed to score a little over 450 runs in 16 matches.

Quite unbelievably, Gayle went unsold at the 2011 IPL auction but was picked up by RCB later on as a replacement for Dirk Nannes and it turned out to be the second best decision they ever made (first being the signing of Virat Kohli). In his first season with the Royal Challengers, Gayle smashed 608 runs from 12 matches at a strike rate of more than 180 with two hundreds and three fifties.

The Gayle juggernaut has rolled on ever since and the Jamaican has become one of the top run getters in IPL history, scoring more than 700 runs in two editions.