Malolan Rangarajan on how RCB management ensured smooth player retention process

Royal Challengers Bengaluru Women are the defending champions of the Women's Premier League (WPL), and will aim to replicate the performances from 2024 in the upcoming 2025 edition as well. Ahead of the important tournament, the franchise had announced their retentions on Thursday, November 07, where star players like Ellyse Perry and Shreyanka Patil were retained, and of course, their skipper and opener Smriti Mandhana.

The franchise released names like Disha Kasat, Indrani Roy, Nadine de Klerk, Shubha Satheesh, Shraddha Pokarkar, Simran Bahadur. The franchise also traded Danni Wyatt-Hodge and added the star English player to bolster their squad further. RCB will enter the WPL 2025 Auction with a purse of INR 3.25 Crore, and their assistant coach Malolan Rangarajan explained the idea behind the retentions and what the team plans to do at the auction, and later in the season.

“As far as the management is concerned, I think their belief in not only the retained players, just the whole process we've had through this WPL, the previous WPL. I have the good fortune of being part of both the IPL and WPL setup and what I would say is consistency with the management and going into this whole retention process.

It was running parallelly with the IPL, and they've been very, very calm. They're a group of people who understand all sides of the facets that we bring on the table, and they've been very consistent and once the recommendations were given, they were able to debate and deliberate and most importantly understand where the coaching staff and the decision makers were coming in, including the captain,” Rangarajan explained.

Malolan Rangarajan on the idea behind WPL retention

“As far as the coaching staff is concerned, I think it is very, very important for us to remember what worked for us on and off the field from last season and retaining our core values on the field and off the field that we had. That should not dictate our decisions but should guide our decisions. So keeping those things in mind, we came up with the set of retentions. We've also thought really hard about how we wanted to recruit in the last auction, and we brought in a couple of players with experience. So that's held together and given us a good core to go forward with,” said Rangarajan further.

Check Here: WPL 2025: RCB-W Retained and Released Player List along with RCB-W Remaining Purse

Malolan on plan ahead of WPL 2025 Auction

“What will happen between now and the auction is that we'll have a couple of camps for our players and I'd like to mention for the players of interest, which will help us inform creating our shortlist of players for the auction and hopefully even make it a little bit more certain as to who we need to target and who we could have as backups. So, with the auction in December, the plan would be to have a camp prior to the auction and hopefully get the team we're looking for,” he concluded.