Chennai Super Kings veteran Ambati Rayudu led to a massive stir on social media on May 14 by backtracking from his decision to retire from the Indian Premier League within 30 minutes from when he had announced the news.
“I am happy to announce that this will be my last ipl. I have had a wonderful time playing it and being a part of 2 great teams for 13 years. Would love to sincerely thank Mumbai Indians and Csk for the wonderful journey,”
Rayudu had posted in his deleted tweet, a screengrab of which is doing the rounds.
Within half hour of posting the retirement tweet, Rayudu took a u-turn from it and withdrew his call, leading to speculations if the Super Kings batter made his decision in haste after a disappointing season for him and his team and whether the CSK ownership and management group were even aware of what the player was contemplating?
Reports are that the CSK think-tank, including CEO Kasi Viswanathan, spoke to Rayudu immediately after his tweet came to light and asked to pull it back and not take such a big decision after one bad campaign with the side.
“I spoke to him and he is not retiring. He was disappointed with his performance and that’s why he might have put out that tweet. But he has deleted it and he is definitely not retiring…,”
Viswanathan told Sportstar amidst the controversy.
Even though the CEO clarified what had happened beneath the deleted tweet, Rayudu taking to twitter to declare his farewell from the league without proper communication with his team was good enough to create a heavy furore and lead to question marks on the existing dressing room atmosphere in the CSK set-up.
Those questions carry weight with this being the second such controversy surrounding the defending champions, who are out of the playoffs race this season with eight losses from twelve games. The first one related to a debatable switch of captaincy back to MS Dhoni, only eight games after the franchise announced premier allrounder Ravindra Jadeja as their new skipper.
While Jadeja voluntarily quit the leadership post and requested Dhoni to take the mantle back, such a quick reversion on that front gave strength to the claim that CSK remain Dhoni’s team by heart and soul and aren’t willing to approach a new era without their trusted legendary wicketkeeper-batter around in some capacity.
Dhoni, who spoke with empathy for Jadeja and the mental and physical fatigue that extra responsibility took on him, also said that the imminent captaincy switch was informed to the allrounder at the end of IPL 2021 only. But it remains under cloud why the legend opted to resume captaincy duties if the idea was always to identify a new skipper and groom him.
The moment the player made his retirement tweet, fans and prominent names within the cricket fraternity started to pour in praise on him from all corners, besides wishing him well for the future. But they were all left shocked when the player withdrew his own decision to retire.
This was the second time in the last three years when Rayudu has done so after famously backtracking from his decision to retire internationally following his axing from India’s squad for the 2019 World Cup in UK. The cricketer even took a jibe at the then chief selector MSK Prasad for preferring allrounder Vijay Shankar above him. Soon, however, Rayudu took a u-turn on his decision and resumed his playing duties.
