Rising Pune Supergiants, Shardul Thakur, IPL 2017, IPL 2017 trade
IANS

Rising Pune Supergiants have been one of the active teams ahead of IPL 2017. They made headlines after they purchased England all-rounder Ben Stokes in the IPL auction in Bengaluru last month for Rs 14.5 crore. Even before that, RPS had made some major changes in their squad, removing MS Dhoni as the skipper and replacing the Jharkhand man with Australia's Steve Smith as the new captain.

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After having spent so heavily on Stokes during the auction, they were not left with much money as they had come into the IPL 2017 auction with a sum of Rs 17.5 crore. Now, they have decided to strengthen their bowling attack, acquiring the services of Kings XI Punjab pacer Shardul Thakur, who has only one IPL game under his belt, via trade.

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The news does not come as a major surprise as RPS look quite weak in their bowling attack, and Thakur could play an important role for the team with Ashok Dinda and Jaydev Unadkat as the other Indian pacers on the list.

RPS may have gone ahead with their decision to get Thakur after his impressive showing in the Vijay Hazare Trophy, where he is bowling splendidly well and taking wickets regularly for Mumbai.

One look at the overall squad shows that they are strong on the batting front, with players like Smith, Dhoni, Ajinkya Rahane and Faf Du Plessis, but they lack in the bowling department. However, this is not RPS' first trade ahead of IPL 2017, as they had signed Delhi Daredevils opener Mayank Agarwal well before the IPL 2017 auctions. 

Rising Pune Supergiants squad: Steven Smith (c), MS Dhoni (w), Mitchell Marsh, Ishwar Pandey, Rahul Chahar, Usman Khawaja.Rajat Bhatia, R Ashwin, Saurabh Kumar, Adam Zampa, Ajinkya Rahane, Rahul Tripathi, Daniel Christian, Milind Tandon, Lockie Ferguson, Manoj Tiwary, Deepak Chahar, Faf du Plessis, Ankit Sharma, Ankush Bains, Ashok Dinda, B Aparajith, Ben Stokes, Jaskaran Singh, Jaydev Unadkat, Mayank Agarwal, Shardul Thakur.