Kieron Pollard will be leading the MI Emirates team in the ILT20 and Rashid Khan will be captaining the MI Cape Town side in the SA20 next year. The inaugural season of both the leagues will be played parallelly in January-February 2023.
MI Emirates and MI Cape Town are the sister franchises of Mumbai Indians, all owned by Reliance.
Pollard, who has recently retired from the IPL and will be the batting coach of Mumbai Indians in IPL 2023, is the skipper of MI Emirates, while superstar leg-spinner Rashid Khan, who is vice-captain of the Gujarat Titans in the IPL, is the captain of MI Cape Town.
MI Cape Town will play their first match of the SA20 2023 season against Paarl Royals on January 10 at their home ground in Cape Town. They have recently added fast bowler Jofra Archer, who is also part of Mumbai Indians, as their wildcard signing for the tournament. Archer hadn’t played competitively since March 2021 due to finger and elbow injuries, but recently made a promising comeback in a three-day game for England Lions in Abu Dhabi.
Three other England cricketers – Sam Curran, Liam Livingstone and Olly Stone – are part of the MI Cape Town side, along with South African stars Kagiso Rabada, Rassie van der Dussen, and Dewald Brevis, who made his IPL debut in 2022 with MI.
Simon Katich is the head coach of MI Cape Town.
MI Emirates also have a number of established T20 players in Dwayne Bravo, Nicholas Pooran, Trent Boult and Imran Tahir along with Pollard.
MI Emirates will be coached by Shane Bond, who has been the bowling coach at Mumbai Indians since 2015, and the coaching staff includes Parthiv Patel, Vinay Kumar and James Franklin, and Robin Singh the general manager of cricket.
Earlier, South African Mark Boucher was appointed as the head coach of Mumbai Indians as their previous head coach, Mahela Jayawardene was moved to the Global head of performance role, and Zaheer Khan as the Global head of cricket development) to oversee all three teams.
