On January 20, 2021, all the eight franchises of the Indian Premier League (IPL) announced the list of players they have released and retained before the auction for the 2021 IPL edition. Today was the deadline for the franchises to do so and each of them gave it a lot of thought and discussion.

Three-time champions Chennai Super Kings decided to let go of many players including veteran Harbhajan Singh, who had announced the same before on Twitter. Apart from him, CSK also released the likes of Kedar Jadhav, Murali Vijay, Harbhajan Singh, Piyush Chawla, Shane Watson (retired), and Monu Singh.

IPL 2021: Royal Challengers Bangalore – List of players retained and released

This means 2010, 2011, and 2018 IPL winners don’t have a top-class off-spinner in their ranks.

The CSK squad after retention of players is as follows:

MS Dhoni (C), Suresh Raina, Ambati Rayudu, N Jagadeesan, Faf du Plessis, Ruturaj Gaikwad, Sam Curran, Ravindra Jadeja, Dwayne Bravo, Mitchell Santner, Josh Hazlewood, Karn Sharma, Shardul Thakur, KM Asif, R Sai Kishore, Imran Tahir, Deepak Chahar and Lungi Ngidi.

The Players Slot Remaining – 7; Indians - 6, Overseas – 1.  Purse remaining- INR 22 crores.