The controversy over the lid effectively shut on Shreyas Iyer’s cricketing career despite being India’s top run getter in the short format topping this year’s IPL batting standings once again casting the inform batter to the wilderness overlooked for the Asia Cup, does go to highlight the dirty side of cricket. At least in that part of the sub continent. That everything is not played fair and square, and lamentably a cricket tragic story that it is after all a mug’s game. Starkly reminding one of the good. the bad and the ugly side of cricket.
In this case of the 26 year old Shreyas Iyer literally tailor made for one day cricket who has absolutely done everything within his means to prove himself worthy of selection wi CCCth nothing more to prove.
Indeed, the dirty and ugly mug side of it is best reflected by the very unreasonable bland open and shut words of India’s chief selector, Ahit Agarkar that Shreyas Iyer’s omission is ‘Not his fault, Nor is it ours.’
Taken in the real context of fair play nothing short of the harsh where the man who holds the power of the sword has in all reality kicked out Iyer from the realms of contention on an altogether unacceptable basis that absolutely holds no water.
The latest controversy of a player virtually thrown to the wolves when factually the doors of recognition should have opened out for Iyer does follow an over boiling development in Indian cricket that began by the sudden knee jerk retirements of India’s topmost modern age legends Virat Kohli and Test captain Rohit Sharma, apparently sparked by dissent with the Indian cricket hierarchy which have chiefly been the chief selector Agarkar and head coach Gautam Gambir. It has apparently flowed in bad blood in a mix of dissent with a cross section of India speaking up for Kohli and Sharma and another against with the experts drawn to the fray.
With an average of 50.33, a strike rate of 175.07, and six fifties, the Punjab Kings captain Shreyas Iyer scored 604 runs in 17 games in the IPL 2025.