With the T20 World Cup all over, the focus is now on the upcoming edition of the Indian Premier League’s mini-auction, which is all set to take place on 23rd December. Ahead of the mini-auction, all the franchises have come out with the list of players they have retained and released for the next edition of the Indian Premier League. All the franchises were asked to submit their trades and retentions by 5:30 PM IST on Tuesday, 14 November ahead of the mini auctions, set to take place in December, later this year.
To retain or not to retain Kane Williamson was one of the biggest questions for Indian Premier League franchise SunRisers Hyderabad ahead of the final day of retentions on 15 November. Kane Williamson has been a part of the Sunrisers Hyderabad for eight years, scoring 2101 runs at an average of 36.22 and a strike rate of 126.03. He played 76 matches for Sunrisers and captained them 46 times.
Williamson was one of three players retained by the franchise ahead of the 2022 auction: Sunrisers spent INR 14 crore – which was the highest amount of price paid to retain an overseas player in the IPL.
Meanwhile, explaining the reason why SRH released Kane Williamson, former SRH head coach Tom Moody has said that the team should give it a good thought on the matter of their captain. He said:
“It’s an interesting one for Sunrisers, because when you commit at the beginning of a big auction to retain a player of the caliber of Kane Williamson at 14 crores, you would think that they are thinking about the long term. They’re thinking about the bigger picture. But clearly, he’s had a disastrous campaign in the last four months in T20 cricket, certainly not up to his standards.”
He added: “We know his quality as a leader. He’s a highly respected leader in the IPL and globally. So, it just depends on how much weight they put on that leadership. So, whether they release him or not. To me, 14 crores is a lot of money for any player.”
List of players released and retained by the Sunrisers Hyderabad franchise:
Players retained: Abdul Samad, Aiden Markram, Rahul Tripathi, Glenn Phillips, Abhishek Sharma, Marco Jansen, Washington Sundar, Fazalhaq Farooqi, Kartik Tyagi, Bhuvneshwar Kumar, T Natarajan, Umran Malik
Players released: Kane Williamson, Nicholas Pooran, Jagadeesha Suchith, Priyam Garg, Ravikumar Samarth, Romario Shepherd, Saurabh Dubey, Sean Abbott, Shashank Singh, Shreyas Gopal, Sushant Mishra, Vishnu Vinod
