It is understood that both franchises have spoken to all three players involved

Nagraj Gollapudi09-Nov-202511:36

Sanju Samson – RavindraJadeja trade: shocking, or not?

In one of the most high-profile player trades in IPL history, Rajasthan Royals are set to trade wicketkeeper-batter Sanju Samson to Chennai Super Kings (CSK) in exchange of allrounders Ravindra Jadeja and Sam Curran.It is understood that both franchises have spoken to all three players involved but neither franchise confirmed the development when ESPNcricinfo reached out to them.Both RR and CSK have to send an expression of interest naming the three players involved in the trade to the IPL governing council. As per the trading rules, once the players’ written consent comes in, the franchises can have further discussions for a final agreement, which will also be ratified by the governing council.Samson and Jadeja have been with their respective franchises for a long time. Samson has represented RR for 11 seasons, while Jadeja has played for CSK since 2012, barring the two seasons in 2016 and 2017 when the franchises were suspended. Samson had indicated after IPL 2025 that he was looking for a change and wanted to be released by RR.Related

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Jadeja was retained by CSK ahead of the 2025 mega auction for INR 18 crore as the second player after captain Ruturaj Gaikwad. Along with MS Dhoni, Jadeja has been a constant part of their core. He has been part of three of CSK’s five title wins.Jadeja played a crucial role in CSK’s win in the 2023 final, with his batting heroics in the last over against Gujarat Titans. It was also his best season with the ball as he finished with 20 wickets. He followed the feat with the bat in 2025, scoring 301 runs in the season, including two fifties.Jadeja has played 254 IPL matches, the fifth-most in the tournament behind Dhoni, Virat Kohli, Rohit Sharma and Dinesh Karthik. With 143 wickets, he is the highest wicket-taker for CSK with best bowling figures of 5 for 16. He has the most Player-of-the-Match awards (16) along with Dhoni too. In 2022, Jadeja was appointed CSK captain, but handed the captaincy back to Dhoni midway after a poor start to the season.Sam Curran was bought back by CSK in 2025•BCCI

RR was the first team Jadeja represented in the IPL as a 19-year-old, and also the first team he won the title with in 2008. Jadeja played for RR for the first two seasons but was suspended in 2010 by the IPL for trying to negotiate a contract with Mumbai Indians directly. After the ban, Jadeja featured for Kochi Tuskers in 2011 before being bought by CSK for USD 2 million in 2012.After an impressive maiden IPL in 2013, when RR finished third as well as runner-up in the Champions League T20, Samson was the youngest player retained at 19 ahead of the 2014 season. That first stint lasted until RR’s two-year suspension in 2016-17 and Samson rejoined the franchise in 2018. He was appointed captain in 2021 and, in 2022, working with Kumar Sangakkara, RR’s team director, led the franchise to the IPL final for the first time since 2008.Samson has led RR in 33 wins and 33 defeats in 67 matches. In 2024, when RR made the playoffs again, he had a 500-run IPL season for the first time, scoring 531 at an average of 48.27 and strike rate of 153.47. He was one of six players retained by RR ahead of last year’s mega auction at INR 18 crore and he also remained captain. However, a side injury ruled him out of the second half of IPL 2025, and RR kept losing matches from strong positions to finish ninth out of ten teams.Samson is RR’s leading run-scorer with 4027 runs, has the joint-most 50-plus scores (25), the joint-highest score (124), and has taken the most catches (149). After he informed RR that he wanted to be released, the franchise initiated trade talks with several teams.Curran began his IPL career at Punjab Kings in 2019 and played for them again in 2023 – when he became the league’s most expensive player at INR 18.5 crore – and 2024. In between, he played for CSK in 2020 and 2021. Curran was bought back by CSK for INR 2.4 crore in the 2025 season, when he finished with 114 runs and only one wicket in five games.

The South Africa captain’s composed fifty and his gutsy call to bowl Maharaj proved to be the difference in a nervy win

Firdose Moonda16-Nov-20254:55

Philander: ‘On that surface 123 was like 350-400’

Sometimes a captain gets a feeling of what to do. With tea looming at Eden Gardens on a tense day three, Temba Bavuma had one of those times.India needed 47 runs with three wickets in hand. In reality, they had only two because of Shubman Gill’s injury-enforced absence. Left-hand batter Axar Patel was on strike. He had 10 runs off 12 balls and looked steady but not particularly dangerous. Aiden Markram’s three overs had cost just five runs and he had burgled a wicket, so it seemed sensible to keep him and build pressure. Bavuma had a different idea.Despite the risk that would come from turning the ball into Axar, Bavuma turned to his left-arm spinner Keshav Maharaj. Immediately, it looked like a stroke of genius.Axar could not resist the offer and slog-swept Maharaj to deep midwicket, where Ryan Rickelton was positioned for that shot. But looking into the sun and with spectators in the background potentially blurring his view, Rickelton lost the ball. What could have been a catch became a boundary and suddenly, Bavuma’s decision looked like a tactical blunder, especially with so few runs to play with. It got even worse when Axar hit Maharaj for two sixes in the next three balls and shaved off a third of what India needed in four balls and wasn’t done.Related

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Axar went again off the fifth ball, another slog sweep, but he top-edged it. The ball hung and then dipped through the Kolkata air for the longest few seconds of the last three days.Bavuma sprinted from midwicket to almost long-on and initially looked like he had run too far. The ball was almost behind him when, looking back, he got his self-labelled “small hands” to it and held on by his fingertips. “There’s not much time to think during those moments. The ball went quite high, so I was just trying to make sure that I caught the ball,” Bavuma said after the match.When he did, Bavuma also proved his own plan, which seemed to be unravelling over the previous four balls, right. How had he felt in the moment when Axar was attacking? “You try and keep to your wits. The decision [to bowl Maharaj] stays a decision. It doesn’t change because of the way the guy is batting,” he said. “I knew there was sense behind the decision, so at no point did I second-guess the decision.”That was the way Bavuma played for most of this match.After his first-innings dismissal for 3, when he fell to Kuldeep Yadav’s leg-side trap, Bavuma rewrote his role in the game with a match-winning second-innings 55 not out, which showed a level of self-assurance of a player at his peak. No other batter made more than 39 in the match as variable bounce and, what Bavuma called, “spin that was a little bit on the extreme side yesterday” planted confusion through their game plans. “He went against the grain of everybody else in the match,” Shukri Conrad, South Africa’s coach, said.One of the biggest differences between Bavuma’s innings and everyone else’s was the way he absorbed pressure in the early stages. He scored just four runs off the first 23 balls he faced, and 17 of those deliveries were from the spinners, who were brilliant in squeezing South Africa. “You feel suffocated as a batter but Temba was comfortable. I don’t think anybody’s ever happy to be suffocated but he was comfortable that if he stuck to his game plan, knowing he was going to get beaten by balls on the outside, but as long as he didn’t get beaten on the inside, he knew he could bat through this,” Conrad said.Bavuma explained that given the conditions, he had to rely on the blueprint that is built around the block more than usual. “I found it a bit tricky to trust the bounce of the wicket. Some balls were bouncing nicely, others were squatting, so that was a bit tricky, which made cross-batted shots a bit harder but I always back my defence. My game is that simple. I try to play around my defence,” Bavuma said.2:08

Philander: Conrad’s done himself justice as South Africa coach

In total, he defended 59 of the 136 balls he faced, and the bulk of that was on the second evening, when some of South Africa’s shot selection left much to be desired. While Ryan Rickelton and Tristan Stubbs were done by lack of turn, Wiaan Mulder and Tony de Zorzi by extra bounce, Markram swept straight to short leg and Kyle Verreynne and Marco Jansen got slog sweeps horribly wrong. Bavuma was on 29 off 78 balls overnight. His only two aggressive shots were a sweep off Ravindra Jadeja and a backfoot punch off Kuldeep Yadav that went for four.The sweep came out a few more times on the third day, when Bavuma had to drag South Africa to a defendable total and could not have done it without support from Corbin Bosch, with whom he added 44 for the eighth wicket. Their approach on the third morning was to “just try and play what’s in front of me and try not to have too many preconceived ideas”, Bavuma said.That mindset brought what Conrad called a “calmness” to South Africa overall because they know that even though Bavuma is as likely as anyone to get a ball he can’t keep out, he very seldom gives his wicket away and works for every run. Bavuma created his own opportunities to accumulate singles (33) and twos (3) by playing with soft hands and setting off for his runs quickly, often just as he had hit the ball. “The fact that he’s been here before might also have given him that bit of confidence,” Conrad said.But being in India before was also humiliating for Bavuma, especially his most recent visit in 2023, at this very ground. Eden Gardens was where he finished the ODI World Cup as the only member of the top five not to score a century and where he played in the semi-final with a hamstring injury. He hasn’t hidden away from what he called his own “poor record” in the country and had come on this Test tour determined to improve on that and prove himself in these conditions. Now, South Africa are unbeaten in 11 Tests under his captaincy.That he has achieved something special was evident when the almost 40,000 people who came to watch the match on Sunday gave him a standing ovation when he reached his half-century. Though they were stunned into silence by his catch later on, it was clear that the Kolkata faithful appreciated South Africa’s efforts, and Bavuma may well have won them over. “It was crazy. Obviously the crowd cheers quite loudly when India has done something good but it gives us energy and keeps us connected to the game. As much as it spurs on the Indian team, it also has a positive influence on us,” Bavuma said.And sometimes when you have a feeling that things are going your way, you end up with a result like South Africa’s.

In the absence of the injured Gill, Rahul will captain India in the upcoming three-match ODI series against South Africa

ESPNcricinfo staff29-Nov-20257:34

Rahul: ‘Senior players make dressing room feel more confident’

KL Rahul has led India in 12 ODIs, three Tests and one T20I and as before he slips into the hot seat again with the regular captain injured. He sees himself as one of India’s finishers, having hit the winning runs in the Champions Trophy semi-final against Australia and being out there when those winning runs were scored in the final against New Zealand as well.”Just a day before the announcement, I was told that the opportunity might come and I might have to lead,” Rahul said on the eve of the first ODI against South Africa in Ranchi on Sunday. “I have captained the side before. It is something that is very exciting. I look forward to enjoying that responsibility. I have always enjoyed responsibility, making the right decisions for the team. That’s about it. I don’t think too much about it.”Related

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Rahul will have the support of a generation of players that have played together for a long time and he was keen to tap into them as India build up towards the 2027 ODI World Cup.”I obviously have Rohit [Sharma], Virat [Kohli], Jaddu [Ravindra Jadeja], all the senior players around me who will help out,” Rahul said. “How we have all played our cricket is to think of it as we are all leaders and we try and do the best for the team. That continues whether I am captain or someone else is captain. It is always a collective effort to doing something in the direction of a bigger goal.”KL Rahul has captained India in 12 ODIs so far•PTI

The most recent memory of Rahul on a cricket field, however, was a mis-hit where he reached out to a Simon Harmer offbreak trying to play a drive but was beaten by the drift and dip to be bowled. India were trying to leave day four in Guwahati unscathed. They weren’t quite able to and sunk to a heavy defeat.”There is no regret of not trying a different shot,” Rahul said when asked if he might have been served better by going down the track, if only to defend. “There is a regret of executing what I did.”It is a Test format. At the stage that I was playing, it was the last few overs of the day. I don’t think that’s the right time for me to try and step down and hit the bowler for a boundary.”Looking back, yes, maybe I would have [come down and blocked it] but it was only the second ball of the over. If I had stepped down and gotten out, maybe that would have been a question mark in my own head as to whether that was right or wrong. At that point in time, I think defending was the right option to do which I didn’t do well enough.”The damage done by visiting spinners at home has turned the spotlight on the India batters ability against the turning ball.”I don’t know why we were better in playing spin before and not so good now,” Rahul said. “There are a lot of reasons. But we can just think about how we can do better as players. How individually we can do better and when in six-seven months we are in a similar situation against Sri Lanka [away] and the home series against Australia, so how we can do better and what are the technical changes we need to make. These are things we’ll individually seek answers. And like you said, we used to play spin very well before so we’ll reach out to those players and try to learn something from our seniors.”

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