With their sixth win of this year’s Indian Premier League (IPL) following the four-wicket win over Chennai Super Kings at Chepauk on. Wednesday, Punjab Kings have now climbed to the second spot with 13 points. While the Shreyas Iyer led team saw their pace spearhead Lockie Ferguson suffering an leg injury during the team’s match against Sunrisers Hyderabad last month, the team also saw Australian all-rounder Glenn Maxwell being ruled off the IPL due to a finger injury earlier this week. With the team still not decided about the two players’ replacements, Punjab Kings coach and former Australian captain Ricky Ponting has shared about how Pakistan Super league happening at the same time is impacting the team’s decision.
“So we’ve actually been a little bit patient. Maxi’s only been a couple of days, Lockie’s has been two or three weeks. And with the PSL happening at the same time, there’s not a lot of high-quality replacements out there, to be honest. So we’ve just been patient. We’re having a look around at Indian talent as well and we’re looking at what roles we might be able to fill with some younger Indian players,” said Ponting while addressing the media post the match.
Kings will play their next match at their home venue of Dharamshala when they face xxx on May 4. The team had retained only two players in the form of Shashank Singh and Prabhsimran Singh ahead of last year’s mega auction and had added 23 players spending more than 110 crore in the auction. While the team has tried to fill Ferguson’s place with Australian Xavier Bartlett or Afghan Azmatullah Omarzai, the team has very few all-rounders options in their squad of 25. “We’ll actually take a couple of guys to Dharamsala with us, a couple of guys trained with us yesterday and they will come with us to Dharamsala, we’ll have a closer look at them and they might find themselves with a Punjab contract going forward. It has to be this week, has to be before the 12th game, so stay tuned,” added Ponting.
The former Australian also believes that Omarzai along with Bartlett and Aaron Hardie, who has yet to play a game, can do the work for the team. “We’ve got until our 12th game, so we still have a couple of games to go yet. With the squad we’ve got, we’re trying to find players in our squad anyway, we’ve got most bases covered. So we’ve got Azmatullah (Omarzai), Aaron Hardie, who hasn’t played yet, Xavier Bartlett who didn’t play today, it’s conditions based. But when we get to Dharamsala he will come back into the reckoning up there, where the ball might swing and bounce a little bit more,” said Ponting.
Prior to the match against Chennai Super Kings, captain Shreyas Iyer too had spoken about the replacements.
“To be honest, we haven’t decided about the replacements yet so far but we are pretty strong in our team’s mindset and what we have outside of our playing XI. We’ve got varieties of players who can win you matches. So we’re going to stick to that as much as possible,” Iyer said at the toss.
