Rinku Singh
The Indian cricket team is currently busy playing the Border-Gavaskar series in Australia. At the same time, the strong players of the limited overs team are making their mark in domestic cricket. Recently Syed Mushta Ali Trophy was completed. Mumbai won the Syed Mushtaq Ali Trophy title by defeating Madhya Pradesh. After this tournament, now 50 over tournament is going to start in domestic cricket. We are talking about Vijay Hazare Trophy which is going to start tomorrow i.e. 21st December. Uttar Pradesh has announced its team for this tournament.
Got captaincy for the first time
Uttar Pradesh has appointed Rinku Singh as the captain of its team for the 50-over domestic competition Vijay Hazare Trophy. He replaces Bhuvneshwar Kumar, who led Uttar Pradesh in the Syed Mushtaq Ali Trophy that concluded last week, where the team lost to Delhi in the quarter-finals. This is the first time that Rinku will captain a state team at the senior level. Earlier this year, he led Meerut Mavericks to the UPT20 league title, scoring 210 runs in nine innings at a strike rate of 161.54. Rinku’s overall List A statistics are quite impressive. He has scored 1899 runs in 52 innings at an average of 48.69 and has a strike rate of 94.8, which includes one century and 17 half-centuries.
Progress made before IPL
Rinku Singh’s promotion to the UP team comes at a time when his IPL franchise Kolkata Knight Riders (KKR) is considering its captaincy options ahead of IPL 2025. He has been a part of the KKR setup since 2018, and was retained along with Sunil Narine, Andre Russell, Varun Chakravarthy and Ramandeep Singh ahead of the mega auction in November. The team of Uttar Pradesh i.e. UP will start its campaign in the tournament on 21 December against Jammu and Kashmir and after that Mizoram (23 December), Tamil Nadu (26 December), Chhattisgarh (28 December), Chandigarh (31 December) and Vidarbha ( 3 January).
