The Royal Challengers Bangalore’s Director of Cricket Operations, Mike Hesson said that he was happy to have retained the 12 players that the franchise did for the upcoming 2012 season. “We made it to the semi-finals for the first time in three years in the 2020 season and on the basis of that thought of rewarding the players. We are very happy to have retained the 12 members,” he said.
Reflecting upon the decision of whom to retain and whom not to Hesson, 52, said, “We knew that we had some gaps in certain areas of the game. Obviously, the middle overs were a concern for us so we have retained the 12 players only as few are unavailable also due to retirement and other things.”
The former New Zealand coach also said that the focus of the team was to give more chances to young players and hence a lot of retainers are young players. “Our focus was young players as we gave game time to young guns in the last season in the form of Mohammed Siraj, Washington Sundar, Navdeep Saini, and Shahbaaz Ahmed,” he said.
Two big names in the form of Aaron Finch and Chris Morris were released from the team. Speaking about that, Hesson said, “With Chris Morris, he has been injured and hasn’t played a lot of cricket at the highest level, so there is a bit of risk there. With Finch, it did not work out the way we wanted it to.”
RCB Retained Players: Virat Kohli, AB de Villiers, Devdutt Padikkal, Md. Siraj, Navdeep Saini, Washington Sundar, Yuzvendra Chahal, Joshua Phillipe, Pavan Deshpande, Shahbaz Ahmed, Adam Zampa, Kane Richardson
RCB Released Players: Chris Morris, Shivam Dube, Aaron Finch, Umesh Yadav, Dale Steyn, Moeen Ali, Parthiv Patel, Pawan Negi, Isuru Udana, Gurkeerat Mann
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