Aakash Chopra, a former Indian cricket player, compared Jos Buttler’s role up till the previous season to that of Suryakumar Yadav in the Indian Twenty20 International team. He drew attention to RR’s glaring absence of an experienced batter in their lineup.
Before the IPL 2025 season started, there were high expectations for the Rajasthan Royals. But the campaign has fallen well short of what both fans and pundits had expected. The Mumbai Indians recently thrashed RR by 100 runs, making them the second team eliminated from the competition.
“After they made the decision to use an all-Indian batting lineup, with Shimron Hetmyer lower down the order—the lone overseas batting option—and Samson as the oldest and most experienced player, I’m wondering if that was even a feasible choice. We argue that it’s a game for young men, which is wonderful, but when you consider that all of them are skilled and talented, but there isn’t a senior stateman in the team, as Jos Buttler did until last year, is that really a possibility?” For example, ESPNcricinfo mentioned Chopra.
You still need a Suryakumar Yadav to manage everyone around him, both before and after him, even in the Indian T20 team. He said, “Hardik Pandya enters and provides you with some stability.”
There isn’t a senior man to keep you together: Aakash Chopra
The well-known pundit said that depending only on children could either yield significant benefits or completely backfire.
“This type of performance is virtually a representation of what young people can provide you on a bad day. Naturally, you can get what Vaibhav Suryavanshi will give you from young people in the future. “With this team, two wildly disparate performance extremes are still possible, and you don’t have a senior guy to keep it together,” Chopra continued.
None of the other RR hitters have been reliable, with the exception of Yashasvi Jaiswal, who has shown outstanding with 439 runs in 11 innings this season. This has typically resulted in poor performance, which has seriously harmed the team in the 2025 Indian Premier League.
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