Shreyas Iyer!!- The Unsung Captain

From being the most fearsome in WC Finals to not even getting placed in BCCI contract list to IPL Finals as a Captain. Iyer has travelled a long way in the last few months and he has given a befitted answered with his performances.

Believe it or not the most feared player by Australia going into the World Cup Finals was Iyer. (Read all about it in below article)

How Australia's backstage orchestrators plotted India's fall

Though individually they all come with their own pedigree, the Andrew McDonald-led coaching staff is perhaps among the more 'fly under the radar' team managements in cricket currently

https://www.cricbuzz.com/cricket-news/128581/how-australias-backstage-orchestrators-plotted-indias-fall

After being the 3rd highest run scorer for India in WC, Iyer played a couple of T20 matches for India, in one of them he even hit a half century. After that he switched formats to play in tests, where his returns weren’t that exciting.

He returned to home citing an injury relapse and had to miss the other three games. He also couldn’t play Ranji trophy due to the same reason. After missing Mumbai's Ranji Trophy quarterfinal, the 29-year-old had to live with the stigma of defaulting on domestic cricket since the National Cricket Academy's medical department failed to find any problems with his back. Although the Mumbai teams head coach (Omkar Salvi) was well aware of Shreyas back problems.

Since the NCA had shown no interest in treating Iyer, he had to turn towards his IPL teams staff where he participated in KKR’s pre season camp wherein his health improved from playing 60 balls in a session to 200 balls in a session. Even after his match winning returns at the World Cup, Iyer was removed from the list of centrally contracted cricket players in a matter of months leaving him with no answers as to why such a decision was taken.

If this decision was taken because Iyer did not play in domestic tournament then it is worth noting that in January 2024, he played for Mumbai just after returning from South Africa. No one talks about that and the commitment that he had shown during that time. In 2023 this man had missed an entire years of cricket, entire IPL season just to get over his injury why would he lie about an injury now. To give perspective this was the fifth consecutive tournament/series that he was playing in.

Ignoring all this, he did play again in the semifinals and finals of Mumbai's Ranji Trophy run. Scoring a class defining 95(111), although he was unable to play in the final two days of the title match due to a recurrence of the injury.

He started the IPL 2024 season with doubts about his personal fitness and place in the bigger picture. The fact that he was the captain required him to put the team's needs ahead of his own difficulties, which he has done wonderfully taking his team to IPL Finals.

He hasn’t been in his best of forms lately, but he is the best choice for future Indian Captain presently. Many have been saying that KKR has come to the finals all due to Gautam Gambhir. Of course Gambhir has had a role to play in this but you can’t steal the credit due to Shreyas and give it to Gambhir.

I would like to remind all of you that Iyer was the one that took DC’s captainship from a failing captain i.e. Gautam Gambhir in mid-2019 and rallied a young DC team into IPL 2019 Semi-Finals and IPL 2020 Finals. In fact if DC is any relevant today it is all because of Iyer.

Shreyas Iyer is one of the only ICT players who is criticized the most, even after consistently performing either as a batsmen or as a captain.