Lucknow Super Giants

LSG Next Match

The Indian Premier League welcomed two new teams making it a 10-team event when Lucknow and Ahmedabad franchises became part of IPL in October 2021. The new franchises will be part of the upcoming IPL in 2022.

While the biggest stadium in India went to Ahmedabad as their home ground, Lucknow got the Atal Bihari Vajpayee Ekana Cricket Stadium as their home ground. This stadium is quite new and has started hosting international matches since November 2018. It has a decent sitting capacity of close to 50,000 for the ardent Lucknow fans to experience the performance of their home franchise.
 

Lucknow in IPL 2022

The Lucknow franchise is all set to embark on the IPL journey beginning IPL 2022. Cricket betting will provide comprehensive coverage with pre-match and live odds offered by a plethora of sports betting websites. We will also provide the live scores and commentary for a complete match experience. Stay tuned to this space for more updates.

Lucknow Team

The Lucnknow franchise has released that the name of the franchise would be Lucknow Supergiants. The name seems to resemble the name of the previous franchise – Rising Pune Super Giants – held by the RPSG group. They have decided to keep the Supergiants in the name of the new franchise as well.

The auctions before IPL 2022 will be the first Mega Auctions after the one that happened before the inaugural season of IPL back in 2008. The 8 old franchises have finalized their retentions (maximum four) while Lucknow have also picked up max 3 players – as per the rules for new franchises – before the auctions which will be discussed later.

Just like every other franchise, Lucknow have also been allotted a purse of INR 90 Crore (approx. USD 12 million) to select a squad of about 25 players. They are allowed 4 picks before the auctions which will reduce their purse by a certain amount before going into the Mega Auctions.

Lucknow have roped in former cricketer and coach Andy Flower for the position of the Head coach with former Indian wicketkeeper Vijay Dahiya as the assistant coach. Former cricketer and an MP – Gautam Gambhir – has been mentoring the side in the IPL.

Lucknow Best Players

With just 3 retentions allowed to both the new teams before the Mega Auctions, the new franchises such as Lucknow had a bigger pool of players to choose from in their team-building effort. A lot of marquee players had been released by their respective franchises while some had decided to head to the auctions themselves.

This provided a good opportunity for Lucknow Supergiants to pick 3 players before the auctions that will form the core of the team. They had players such as KL Rahul, Shikhar Dhawan, Shreyas Iyer, Dinesh Karthik to choose from as their skipper. The overseas players such as Ben Stokes and Aron Finch could also be good options for leadership.

The most likely player to lead them was KL Rahul and that is exactly what Lucknow went for as their first pick. KL Rahul – who has been a consistent run-scorer for the last 3 seasons – has been picked up by Lucknow for INR 15 Crore. He will also lead the franchise in their inaugural season. This is a career-defining time for KL Rahul. He currently leads India in ODIs in the absence of Rohit Sharma and is a front-runner for Test captainship after the recent announcement by Virat Kohli to give up the Test captainship.

Rahul has played for 3 different franchises in the past namely – Royal Challengers Bangalore, Sunrisers Hyderabad and Punjab Kings. He has led Punjab Kings as well and has scored 2548 runs with a superb average of 56.62 in the 4 seasons with the Punjab franchise. He has averaged 50 in each of the last 4 IPL seasons.

Lucknow went for the Australian all-rounder Marcus Stoinis as their overseas pick. He is a handy all-rounder and has won T20 matches both with bat and ball. He was picked up for INR 11 Crore. The all-rounder has played for 3 different franchises before this – namely, Delhi, Punjab and Bangalore.

The third pick for Lucknow is uncapped spinner Ravi Bishnoi who played under KL Rahul for Punjab Kings in the last season. He was the leading wicket-taker in the 2020 U19 World Cup. Punjab picked him up for INR 2 Crore in his first season and now Lucknow have picked him before auctions for INR 4 Crore. He took 12 wickets for Punjab in the last season with an economy of under 7 runs per over.

With these picks, the Lucknow franchise has spent INR 30 Crore and are remaining with a purse of INR 60 Crore going into the Mega Auction scheduled to happen on 12 and 13 February.

Lucknow Owners

The Lucknow Supergiants was sold to the highest bidder of the new franchise auctions held in October 2021. The RPSG group – RP-Sanjeev Goenka Group – bid an enormous amount of INR 7090 Crore (approx. USD 940 million) – the largest bid among all the bidders – to win the auctions for the Lucknow franchise.

To put things in perspective, the RPSG group’s winning bid was over INR 1900 Crore more than the next bidder. The bid by RPSG was also over 3.5 times more than the minimum price set by BCCI at INR 2000 Crore.
 

This is the second innings for RPSG Group in the IPL after owning the Pune based franchise for a couple of years back in IPL 2016 and 2017. This time they are in for a longer haul with the Lucknow Supergiants.