Ahead of the upcoming seasons of the Indian Premier League (IPL), an incident took place in Cape Town which shook the cricketing fraternity all over the world. Australian skipper Steve Smith and his deputy David Warner were found guilty of conspiring the attempt of ball-tampering which they commanded Cameron Bancroft to execute. On last Saturday, the incident took place, and Cricket Australia decided to suspend Warner and Smith for 12 months from international cricket while Bancroft for nine months. As a collateral damage of that ball-tampering episode, IPL committee also decided to ban Smith and Warner from the upcoming season, who were the captains of Rajasthan Royals (RR) and Sunrisers Hyderabad (SRH), respectively.

After the announcement of Warner and Smith’s suspension, RR and SRH’s team management had a daunting task of appointing the new captains, who were the backbones of their respective teams. The RR management decided to named Ajinkya Rahane as their new skipper for IPL 2018 while SRH announced that Kane Williamson will lead them in the upcoming season of the cash-rich league.

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Considering their experience of captaining an IPL team, one can clearly say that they are the most inexperienced captains in the history of the cash-rich league. With Rahane having one match experience of captaining the Rising Pune Supergiant (RPS) squad last in which couldn’t manage to register a win, Williamson has never captained in IPL. However, in international cricket Williamson is a renowned captain and this help the SRH team for sure.

Captaincy Records

Considering the fact that they both have almost zero captaincy experience in the Indian Premier League, let us have a look at their international experiences as a captain. Williamson has captained the Blackcaps in 33 matches and managed to maintain a winning percentage of just above 53. On the other hand, even in T20Is, Rahane has led India in just two matches out of which the men in blue lost one and saw victory in one, it’s a record which can’t be judged at all.

Individual Records

While Rahane has been playing in India’s biggest money-spinner since its inception and he has played for teams like Mumbai Indians (MI), Rising Pune Supergiants (RPS) and RR, Williamson took his first step on the field with IPL clothes in the year 2015 and since then he has played for SRH. In terms of batting, Rahane has amassed just over 3000 runs in 105 innings at an average of 33.5 while, Kane has played just 15 matches and managed to gather 411 runs at an average of almost 32. From the batting point of view, both will play a crucial role for their respective teams as they always bat up the order and always been known as one of the most conventional batsmen.

Captaincy Challenges

With Rahane having pretty less experience of leading a team of T20s, it will be interesting to see what approach he opts for RR to find a proper balance in the squad as they don’t have enough bench strength if even a single player from their initial XI gets injured or couldn;t perform according to the expectations. RR team management is yet to finalize a replacement of Smith as a player as they have the options like Martin Guptill, Hasim Amla, Joe Root, etc in the Marquee players’ list.

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Considering the fact that Williamson has enough experience of leading a T20 squad, SRH’s team will surely not miss Warner as a captain as the former has taken the Kiwis to a lot of victories and also maintained the numero uno position in the ICC t20I team ranking for a considerable amount of time. As a captain, he is very proactive despite his calm demeanor on the field while batting. Even as a batsman he is lethal when he gets going, but one has to agree with the fact that SRH has to look up to Alex Hales, who has been named as the replacement of Warner as a player. However, there will still be a challenging job for Kane to find the right balance for SRH as they have a bunch of match-winners like Rashid Khan, Carlos Brathwaite, Deepak Hooda, Bhuvneshwar Kumar and lots more.

Rajasthan Royals’ squad for IPL 2018:

Ajinkya Rahane (c), Ben Stokes, Jaydev Unadkat, Sanju Samson, Jofra Archer, K Gowtham, Jos Buttler, Rahul Tripathi, D’Arcy Short, Dhawal Kulkarni, Zahir Khan, Ben Laughlin, Stuart Binny, Dushmantha Chameera, Anureet Singh, Aryaman Birla, Midhun S, Shreyas Gopal, Prashant Chopra, Jatin Saxena, Ankit Sharma, Mahipal Lomror.

Squad for Sunrisers Hyderabad for IPL 2018:

Kane Williamson (c), Bhuvneshwar Kumar, Manish Pandey, Rashid Khan, Shikhar Dhawan, Wriddhiman Saha, Siddarth Kaul, Deepak Hooda, Syed Khaleel Ahmed, Sandeep Sharma, Alex Hales, Carlos Brathwaite, Shakib Al Hasan, Yusuf Pathan, Shreevats Goswami, Mohammad Nabi, Chris Jordan, Basil Thampi, T Natarajan, Sachin Baby, Bipul Sharma, Syed Mehdi Hasan, Ricky Bhui, Tanmay Agarwal