Australia cricket captain Steve Smith has pulled out of the Indian Premier League to head home for treatment on a wrist injury.
Cricket Australia said Smith had laboured due to pain in his right wrist for the past week while playing for Pune in the Twenty20 tournament.
“From the information we have so far, this doesn’t appear to be a serious injury but we are keen to give him the time to recover and rehabilitate before heading to the West Indies at the end of May,” CA said in a statement yesterday.
All-rounder Mitchell Marsh was also pulled from the IPL to have treatment on a side strain, CA had said on Sunday.
Australia will play a one-day international tournament with West Indies and South Africa in June.
Another Australian batsman, Shaun Marsh, too has been ruled out of the rest of the IPL with an
injury, while another Kangaroo player, George Bailey, made his season entry with team Rising Pune Supergiants.
Marsh, who played six matches for IPL franchise Kings XI Punjab this season, is set to join national teammates John Hastings (Kolkata Knight Riders), Mitchell Marsh and Steve Smith (Pune Supergiants) back home.
Marsh though—unlike Hastings, brother Mitchell and Smith—is not part of the 16-man Australia squad named for the West Indies tri-series starting June 3, which also involves South Africa.
Marsh picked up the injury during the game on April 19 against Kolkata Knight Riders and seemed to have carried the back niggle ever since.
Meanwhile, Bailey signed up for the Mahendra Singh Dhoni-led Pune to give some hope to the team’s stuttering campaign, which was further hit by a string of injuries to its foreign recruits.
Englishman Kevin Pietersen and South Africa’s Faf du Plessis were two early casualties before the latest pullouts of Mitchell and Smith.
Bailey, who had captained the Punjab team in the previous edition, went unsold in the February auctions only to make a late entry into the cash-rich league.
“We lost four crucial players, but we are looking ahead,” said Pune chief executive Raghu Iyer. “Bailey has tremendous experience and had a very successful season before last. He can contribute to the leadership group.
“Smith’s (injury news) been a bummer. He was just coming into his own and this happened. It is a challenging time. Before we could settle down we lost the core group of players around whom you build a team,” Iyer added.