PBKS have received a huge blow, with captain Shreyas Iyer confirming during the toss on Wednesday that Glenn Maxwell has sustained a finger injury, and is set to miss the rest of the IPL 2025 games. Iyer also said that PBKS haven’t decided on Maxwell’s replacement yet. However, in April, PBKS also lost speedster Lockie Ferguson to injury, and his replacement hasn’t been named yet as well. And, Ricky Ponting blamed PSL 2025 for the delay in replacements.
PBKS head coach Ricky Ponting confirmed, “We will be signing some replacements at some stage. We’ve got until our 12th game, so we have a couple of games to go yet. With the squad we’ve got, we’re trying to find players in our squad anyway, we’ve got most basis covered. So we’ve got Azmatullah [Omarzai], Aaron Hardie, who hasn’t played yet, Xavier Bartlett who didn’t play today, it’s conditions based. But when we get to Dharamsala he will come back into the reckoning up there, where the ball might swing and bounce a little bit more.”
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Ricky Ponting also slammed the ongoing PSL 2025 in Pakistan for PBKS’s lack of interest in looking for replacements now as well.
“So we’ve actually been a little bit patient. Maxi’s only been a couple of days, Lockie’s has been two or three weeks. And with the PSL happening at the same time, there’s not a lot of high-quality replacements out there, to be honest. So we’ve just been patient. We’re having a look around at Indian talent as well and we’re looking at what roles we might be able to fill with some younger Indian players. We’ll actually take a couple of guys to Dharamsala with us, a couple of guys trained with us yesterday and they will come with us to Dharamsala, we’ll have a closer look at them and they might find themselves with a Punjab contract going forward. It has to be this week, has to be before the 12th game, so stay tuned,” Ricky Ponting further added.
However, PBKS have almost a week to select their replacements, and their 11th match vs LSG is scheduled to take place on May 4 as well.
