Ahead of the tenth season of the Indian Premier League Season 10, the Rising Pune Supergiants (RPS) franchise has given a massive shock to the Indian cricket fans. The Pune franchise has sacked Mahendra Singh Dhoni as the captain of the team for the upcoming season. Moreover, the franchise has appointed Australian test skipper Steve Smith as the new captain of the team.
In the previous season held last year, RPS managed to win just 5 out of 14 league games under the captaincy of MS Dhoni. In addition, Dhoni’s form was the another concern as he had scored 284 runs in 12 innings with only one fifty to his credit.
Rising Pune Supergiants and Gujrat Lions were the two debut teams which replaced the Chennai Super Kings (CSK) and Rajasthan Royals (RR) in the previous season after a ban of two years was imposed on both CSK and RR under to corruption charges. However, RPS finished seventh in the rank list.
In the last season, MSD’s appointment as Pune’s captain followed by selecting Stephen Flemming as the coach was no wonder then. The think tank which made CSK a master franchise throughout in the history of IPL was back again but in magenta jersey instead of yellow and with a different army of players.
But when the new formation was sent on the field for the floor test, nothing special happened as it was earlier expected. The fitness issue and injuries haunted the key bowlers of the team while despite having several furious hard hitters in the team, it could hardly manage to conquer 5 games.
For the upcoming, following are the names of the players those have been retained by the team:
RPS: MS Dhoni, Ajinkya Rahane, R Ashwin, Steven Smith (Australia), Faf du Plessis (SA), Mitchell Marsh (Australia), Ashok Dinda, Ankush Bains, Rajat Bhatia, Ankit Sharma, Ishwar Pandey, Adam Zampa (Australia), Jaskaran Singh, Baba Aparajith, Deepak Chahar, Usman Khawaja (Australia)
