IPL 2023 retention: The 10 teams of IPL on Tuesday announced the list of released and retained players ahead of the mini auctions in December 2022. While many players were released from their franchises, the omission of Kane Williamson caught some people by surprise. However, the New Zealand skipper has now opened up on his omission.
Ahead of New Zealand's home series against India, Kane Williamson has stated that IPL is an amazing competition and he is not thinking about stepping away from T20 cricket. "No, not really(on reconsidering his IPL future). There are a lot of tournaments around the world, and the IPL is surely an amazing event to be a part of. You see players play for different teams all the time. There are a lot of options, lot of cricket, so for me, I love playing all formats," Williamson said to ESPN Cricinfo ahead of the series against India.
'It wasn't a surprise' - Williamson on being released
Williamson was associated with the orange army ever since he made his IPL debut in 2015. The Kiwi star, who led the SRH team to the final of the 2018 edition also stated that there was no surprise when SRH released him on the retention deadline. That's the way it goes, I had a really enjoyable playing with SRH, and I have a lot of fond memories. It wasn't a surprise when the retention list was officially released, Williamson added.
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The SRH team released a total of 12 players. The list also included West Indies captain Nicholas Pooran. Apart from these two, SRH released Jagadeesha Suchith, Priyam Garg, Ravikumar Samarth, Romario Shepherd, Saurabh Dubey, Sean Abbott, Shashank Singh, Shreyas Gopal, Sushant Mishra, Vishnu Vinod.
The orange army retained Abdul Samad, Aiden Markram, Rahul Tripathi, Glenn Phillips, Abhishek Sharma, Marco Jansen, Washington Sundar, Fazalhaq Farooqi, Kartik Tyagi, Bhuvneshwar Kumar, T Natarajan, Umran Malik
