IPL 2018: Players Retention Procedure To Be A Televised Event

In a first, players retention procedure will now be a big affair, and a ceremony will be conducted where franchises will sit down and open their cards before the season, a report in Mirror suggests.

Earlier, the announcement used to be made by the respective franchises before the cut-off date, but now, there will be a tweak in the procedure. The whole ceremony will be held on January 4 – the last date to retain a player – and it will be a televised event as well.

This will be the first time in the history. In fact, few of the retained players are also expected to attend the event, thus making it a more interesting event as if this will be the case, then players like MS Dhoni, Suresh Raina and few other marquee players can also be in attendance during the event.

Once in 2015, the IPL draft for IPL 2016 & 2017 had a telecast where players like MS Dhoni, Raina, Ajinkya Rahane and few others went to Rising Pune Supergiant and Gujarat Lions but it was more like an auction process.

The upcoming IPL season will start in April. The auction of players for the T20 league will take place on January 27 and 28 in Bangalore. Till now, only Chennai Super Kings have confirmed that they will not let MS Dhoni and Suresh Raina go into auction.

Kolkata Knight Riders are not expected to retain their skipper, Gautam Gambhir. Instead, they are expected to retain all-rounder Sunil Narine. Though the news regarding KKR has come out through reports and everything will be confirmed during the players’ retention ceremony only.

No news regarding retention of any player would not come out before January 4 as it will be only during the ceremony where everything will be clear as if names are revealed earlier, then it will not draw much interest as the public would already know the plans of the franchises.