Indian Premier League (IPL) is world’s leading cricket league where international and domestic Indian cricketers play together and compete to lift the trophy. IPL 2020 was a successful season for Indian cricket board during Covid-19 pandemic. The BCCI has announced that IPL 2021 will be held in India. Eight city-based franchises have released and retained their players for IPL 2021 on January 20, 2021, Wednesday. All the franchise took the decisions looking at their budget and retained their match-winners for 2021 season.
Check IPL 2021 Schedule details here.
List of Released & Retained Players by IPL 2021 Teams
Mumbai Indians (MI) is the defending champions of IPL 2021 and MI is the most successful IPL team. The speciality of Mumbai Indians team is they maintained their core strength and they do believe in their players. MI released their quality fast bowlers Nathan Coulter-Nile, James Pattinson and Mitchell McCleneghan. Lasith Malinga will also be not available for MI in IPL 2021. Mumbai Indians did not give a chance to Chris Lynn in IPL 2020 but yet they retained him for IPL 2021 which is strange.
Delhi Capitals is the emerging team of IPL. They have shown and improved their performance year by year. Delhi Capitals finished as runners up in IPL 2020. It has nearly maintained squad and released English opener Jason Roy, West Indian Keemo Paul, Australian keeper-batsman Alex Carey and Sandeep Lamichhane and Mohit Sharma from bowling department.
KXIP played quality cricket in IPL 2020 but results did not go in favour of them. KXIP has released some of the big international players in the auction of IPL 2021. KXIP has released Australian all-rounder Glenn Maxwell. Probably they will buy him in the auction but who knows what's going on inside the head of leader and owner. They have also released fast bowler Sheldon Cottrell, Kiwi all-rounder James Neesham and Afghani spin bowler Mujeeb Ur Rahman.
KKR performed extremely poor in their previous IPL edition. They have also changed their captain from Dinesh Karthik to Eoin Morgan. KKR has released opener batsman Tom Banton, all-rounder Chris Green and Harry Gurney in the list of overseas players. They also released some of their domestic players but nearly maintained their same squad.
Chennai Super Kings is a very big and famous IPL team. They showed poor performance in the beginning of IPL 2020 but during the end of the season, they played like vintage Chennai Super Kings team. Availability of MS Dhoni for one more season is the biggest good news for all CSK fans. CSK has released Indian players only like Kedar Jadhav, Harbhajan Singh, Piyush Chawla and Murali Vijay. Shane Watson will also not be available for CSK as he took retirement from all forms of cricket.
RCB is one of the strongest team of IPL on paper but on the ground, they have always failed to win a title. RCB has released 10 players from their squad. They released Moeen Ali, Aaron Finch, Chris Morris, Ishuru Udana, Umesh Yadav, G Singh Mann etc. It is looking like that they are going to make a new team in IPL 2021.
SRH is the consistent team of IPL which has performed well in every season of IPL. They have released only 5 players with no such big names and retained their match winners. They have released Billy Stanlake, Fabian Allen etc.
The biggest news from Rajasthan Royals is that they have released their captain Steven Smith and appointed Sanju Samson as the new captain of the team for season 2021. They have also released Oshane Thomas, Tom Curran and Varun Aaron in auction for IPL 2021.
Mumbai Indians is looking very balanced and strong as it has maintained all match winners.