Why Mumbai Indians went with Hardik Pandya as captain for IPL 2024 over Rohit Sharma?

The only thing that’s constant in life is change. All good things, as well as the bad ones, eventually have come to an end. For those who happen to support a certain team in the world’s biggest and richest T20 league, that moment arrived on Friday evening which marked the end of one era and the beginning of another.

Mumbai Indians, one of two of the most successful and popular teams in the Indian Premier League, certainly know a thing or two about pulling off headline-grabbing moves. On 27 November, a day after the deadline for the franchises to announce their list of retained and released players, MI finally confirmed a development that had the entire cricketing community buzzing. That of bringing Hardik Pandya back into their fold after two years.

They had pulled off the ultimate heist by prising Pandya out of the Gujarat Titans, a side that he had led to back-to-back IPL finals including a title on debut in 2022. Transfers aren’t an unusual sight in the Indian Premier League; they get all the more frequent closer to the IPL Retention Day, and can go on till the start of the next season — only briefly put on hold for a week leading to the player auction.

Read | ‘Pandya’s return to Mumbai Indians may have hurt Bumrah’: Kris Srikkanth

However, to take the captain away from a franchise that was beginning to chart a meteoric rise and challenge the established powers is what sets it apart from the other trades. GT had forged a successful captain-coach pairing in Pandya and Ashish Nehra and the two were tactically on point as they bulldozed their way to the title on debut in 2022 and nearly pulled off the rare feat of lifting the trophy in consecutive editions the following year.

Less than three weeks later, however, they would make another announcement that would pale the previous one in terms of impact on the cricketing world in general and the IPL in particular. On Friday evening, MI officially named Pandya captain for the 2024 season, thus bringing Rohit’s trophy-filled, decade-long run as skipper finally to an end.

To new beginnings. Good luck, #CaptainPandya