Cricket

Ambati Rayudu wants to return to cricketing blues and yellows

Ambati Rayudu – stylish middle order bat who hit the headlines in the run-up to the World Cup with his “3D” tweet and decision to retire in a hurry after he was overlooked twice – has changed his mind. He now wants to sport the blues and yellows all over again. That is, play for India and the Chennai Super Kings. 

Speaking to Sportstar, Rayudu accepted that the World Cup snub was disappointing after having worked so hard for the Number 4 spot. He expressed his eagerness to make a comeback to white-ball cricket “as soon as possible”, saying he is “definitely” open to playing for India and the IPL. 

“Not really an emotional decision. No. I mean I had worked a lot for the World Cup for four to five years. Obviously, you will be a bit disappointed. But I had thought maybe it was time, not because it was rejection or emotion, but you work towards something and maybe then you want something else. I had some time to think about this, so thought might as well come and play some cricket,” Rayudu told Sportstar.

The Hyderabad cricketer played 55 ODIs for India, scoring 1,694 runs with three centuries and 10 fifties at 47.05. Though he was spoken of initially as India’s answer to the Number 4 slot, he eventually lost it during selection to Vijay Shankar. Subsequently, when Shikhar Dhawan and Shankar got injured during the World Cup, Rishabh Pant and Mayank Agarwal were called as replacements, ignoring Rayudu. That resulted in his decision to announce his retirement.

It has now been sorted out with the CSK that he would turn out for the MS Dhoni-led squad, it would seem. 

“I am very happy that CSK has always been very supportive. I would be really happy to prepare well for the IPL and represent CSK. Definitely, I would be playing the IPL,” he said.

The Hyderabad cricketer seemed to be in fine touch in Friday’s Tamil Nadu Cricket Association One-day league match at the IIT-Chemplast Ground, scoring 47 off 56 deliveries. 

Leave a Reply

Fill in your details below or click an icon to log in:

WordPress.com Logo

You are commenting using your WordPress.com account. Log Out /  Change )

Google photo

You are commenting using your Google account. Log Out /  Change )

Twitter picture

You are commenting using your Twitter account. Log Out /  Change )

Facebook photo

You are commenting using your Facebook account. Log Out /  Change )

Connecting to %s

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.