Former India opener Shikhar Dhawan announced his retirement, citing a lack of inspiration to return to domestic cricket and pursue a spot back on the Indian team. He noted that for the past few years, he had primarily been playing in the Indian Premier League (IPL), which didn’t provide much cricket.
Following his last appearance for the nation in December 2022, Dhawan made a call to hang up his boots in all disciplines of the game in August 2024. The 38-year-old man played 34 Test matches, 167 One Day Internationals and 68 T20 Internationals, making more than 10,800 runs.
However, towards the twilight of his career, he was restricted to the ODI format only and was ultimately axed following an unsuccessful series against Bangladesh. Speaking to PTI during the course of the Legends League Cricket, the left-handed batter elaborated on the most significant factor that influenced the decision to retire. He articulated:
“I didn’t want to play domestic cricket, which I started playing at the age of 18 or 19 and I didn’t have that inspiration from inside to play that (form of) cricket.”
“If I look back, the last two years of my cricketing career, I wasn’t playing much of international cricket and I was playing IPL to IPL, so I wasn’t playing much of cricket (overall),” the prolific former opening batter added.
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Dhawan played for the Indian team in the 2015 as well as the 2019 ODI World Cups and won the Player of the Tournament award when the Indian national team won the Champions Trophy in 2013, this time in England.
“I felt very happy, satisfied, and content with everything I accomplished in my career”- Shikhar Dhawan
MI Doosra witnessed veteran southpaw leading Punjab Kings (PBKS) in the IPL 2024 season. Unfortunately, his campaign was affected by injury. He managed to play five matches, scoring a total of 152 runs at an average of 30.40 and a strike rate of 125.62, with a top score of 70.
Dhawan stated that he was not playing much cricket and was happy with his accomplishments, so he chose to retire.
“I thought that, ‘alright, I’ve played enough, and I need to give it a break because I’m not playing that much cricket, so you lose the touch as well. I thought that continuing IPL and just coming up with two, three months of hard work won’t be enough for me to go and play,” he said.
“So that was the reason for me to just call it off, and yeah, I was very happy and satisfied and content with whatever I achieved in my career, and very, very grateful for everything,” the 38-year-old added.
With 6,769 runs scored in 222 matches, at an average of 35.26 and a strike rate of 127.14, with two centuries and 51 fifties, Dhawan sits at the Uber Eats IPL all time batting third position.
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