It is absolutely important for the IPL franchises to retain the core part of the players ahead of the auction such that the team can fancy their chances going forward in the tournament in an attempt to make a bid for the title challenge. At times, we have seen how an injury can lead to a player being unavailable for most matches or even the entire season. As a result, it might as well impact the team’s overall performance to some extent as the team might not be able to field the best playing XI.
The absence of a bowler or batsman can literally trouble the team’s equilibrium, making it much tougher to maintain a winning combination. Nevertheless, in the case of CSK, they did extremely well, despite the fact that Ben Stokes featured only two games for the franchise. In fact, England international Ben Stokes was one of the players to watch out for in the IPL 2024. He played a couple of games before being ruled out of the rest of the tournament due to injury.
CSK set to release Ben Stokes ahead of IPL 2024 auction
However, his absence didn’t affect CSK as the Yellow Army lifted the fifth title by beating the Gujarat Titans in the final. It is no secret that repeated injuries might negatively impact a player’s form and confidence levels on the field and the IPL franchises do not want injury-prone players in their squad in the first place. If the reports doing the rounds are to be believed, then CSK is contemplating releasing Ben Stokes ahead of the IPL 2024 auction.
Since Ben Stokes is a perfect three-dimensional material, he was in huge demand already and CSK invested heavily in him by securing his signature for a staggering INR 16.25 crore at the IPL 2023 auction. Ben Stokes was miles behind from hitting the sweet spot last season as he could muster 15 runs with the bat and leaked 18 runs in the only over he bowled.
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The BCCI has notified the IPL teams to release the list of retained players on November 26, which is the deadline date. As per the reports, Ben Stokes is not the top priority for CSK as the Yellow Army is planning to offload him ahead of the auction.
