The Indian cricketer Ravichandran Ashwin has given quite an entertaining perspective on the retention model of the Chennai Super Kings (CSK) stating that he will not keep Mahendra Singh Dhoni as a reserved player before the mega auction for the Indian Premier League (IPL) 2025. Quite the contrary, Ashwin has put forward a different figure as a reserved retention player for CSK, instead of keeping Dhoni as a reserved player who would be one of the five retentions and would leave the remaining spaces available to other players. Ashwin dilated on this during the retentions discussion on his channel.
“If you’re saying if Mumbai Indians are allowed to retain six players then why not CSK? We have Ruturaj (Gaikwad), Jadeja (Ravindra Jadeja), (Matheesha) Pathirana, (Shivam) Dube, MS Dhoni, and Sameer Rizvi,” Ashwin said.
“Just as a devil’s advocate,” Ashwin said with a grin.
Ashwin was met with disagreement by the former South African performance analyst, Prasanna Raman, or ‘PDogg’, as he is more fondly referred to.
“And I don’t think you should retain him for 4 cr Sameer Rizvi. In fact, I don’t even know if he would play for 4 cr,” Raman said.
Before the purchase of Rizvi during IPL 2024 for a mind-blowing Rs 84 crore, he managed to disappoint, making only 51 runs from eight matches with a horrendous strike rate of 118. However, Ashwin was at least positive regarding Rizvi since both he and Rizvi were coming off good showing from the UP T20 League, and also emphasized that there are quite a number of such players and hence there would not be a significant hike in Rizvi’s price.
“He’s been warming up for a show for quite some time now. One is carrying a different level of standings which is him alone in the UP T20. There is tremendous potential with him. He will be in the same league of Shahrukh Khan, Abhinav Manohar and Dhruv Jurel,”
The IPL Governing Council Decision which decided to reinstate the rule that allows Indian players who have not played for the country in the last five or more years, to be considered as ‘uncapped players’ helped CSK in retaining IPL five time winning captain Dhoni at a sum of Rs 4 crore only.
Nonetheless, Ashwin’s view might prove to be useful in retaining a more robust Indian core in CSK. As with other players, Ashwin was with CSK from 2008 to 2015 and helped win two IPL Championships.
