IPL 2025 | Barring Hazlewood, all overseas players join RCB

Bengaluru: A week after chaos and confusion reigned supreme in wake of India-Pakistan conflict, leading to a brief pause, the Indian Premier League will resume here on Saturday with Royal Challengers Bengaluru taking on Kolkata Knight Riders at the M Chinnaswamy Stadium.

Ahead of their crucial match, RCB Director of Cricket Mo Bobat addressed the media, touching upon a range of topics -- from Virat Kohli's retirement from Tests to status of foreign players and injury updates. Excerpts.      

On injury to Rajat Patidar and Josh Hazlewood: In terms of some of those updates, I think we mentioned Rajat and Josh. Yeah, Rajat's doing well. As you all know, he had an injury to his hand. He's been building up ever so slowly. For him personally, probably the disruption gave him a few more days just to get through some of that early healing, for the swelling to go down and to get used to picking up again. 

He's practiced the last few days and he's going well. With Josh, as you'll probably be aware, he's our only player not here at the minute. He's recovering from his shoulder niggle that he had. He's doing that with Cricket Australia. Obviously, our medical team and their medical team have been liaising on what that detail looks like. He's just taking that day by day and he's trying to improve, he's sure.

On international players' availability: Yeah, I'm sure all teams experience the same thing. Once your players have gone home and once the dates have been extended, that creates a bit of uncertainty. We spoke quite a lot with our overseas guys even before they went and most of them were pretty adamant that they were keen to come back and finish the job. We've had a good season so far, they want to come back and do that. The extending of the season presents us with some challenges, so we've had to have a few conversations with some of the national team, company bodies. Obviously, we'll lose Jacob Bethel after a couple of games and we'll lose Lungi after a couple of games. So there's an obvious impact there. In time, we'll give a little bit of thought to those replacements and we'll try and look, we might be able to come in to shore up those positions. 

On Kohli's retirement and conversation: The first thing to say is Virat's just business as usual, as he always is. There's enough of the public and the nation's attention on him, he doesn't want any more of that. He just wants to get on with his business. He's usually ambitious about what we can achieve this year with RCB and that's what he does. I would like to say though that he should be incredibly proud of what he's done as a Test player for India. RCB as a franchise, we are all incredibly proud of what every one of our players does in India this year, but in particular him. To play 120 plus Test matches and to score nearly 10,000 runs is no mean feat. 

Also as a captain, his record, 60% win percentage or something like that as captain, again, no mean feat. I can also talk from my previous role as an Englishman working in the English system. He was someone you never wanted to play against, he was always the batter you wanted to get out.