Twitter reacts to MS Dhoni's removal as the RPS captain

In a shocking turn of events, MS Dhoni has been sacked from the captaincy role of the franchise Rising Pune Supergiants, a day before the player auctions. He had recently stepped down from the captaincy of the India’s limited-overs side and handed it over to Virat Kohli.

But here, he has not voluntarily left the job but the owner of the team Sanjiv Goenka confirmed that he has been removed from the skipper’s job and Steven Smith would be the new captain of the side.

“Dhoni has not stepped down. We have appointed Steve Smith as the skipper for the upcoming season. Frankly speaking, we did not have a good last season and we wanted someone young to lead the side and revamp it ahead of the upcoming season 10”, he was quoted as saying by Deccan Chronicle.

It comes as a hugely surprising news as Dhoni has always been the captain of both the T20 sides that he played for in the IPL. Previously, he was in charge of the Chennai Super Kings and led them to two IPL titles. After CSK was suspended in the year 2016, he moved to the new franchise of RPS.

Also read – Mitchell Starc withdraws his name from IPL 2017

He was a highly successful captain with CSK with the team making it to the playoffs on each of the 8 occasions. However, his stint with the RPS wasn’t that fruitful as the team finished second from the bottom on the points table, the reason why the team owner was forced to make the bold move.

It will now be interesting to see how Smith leads the side as he comes from a foreign nation and Dhoni knew all about the nature of the Indian surfaces and how to manoeuvre the bowlers around. The speculations are that Dhoni would still be the backbone of the side despite Smith being the captain.

Here is how twitter reacted to the shocking decision: