Captain Shreyas Iyer stated after Wednesday's toss that Glenn Maxwell has suffered a fractured finger injury and will probably miss the remaining IPL 2025 games, dealing PBKS a severe setback. Iyer also reaffirmed that Maxwell's replacement has not yet been picked by PBKS.
“It's very unfortunate that he's got a fractured finger," Iyer remarked.
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“To be honest, we haven't decided about the replacements yet so far but we are pretty strong in our team's mindset and what we have outside of our playing XI. We've got varieties of players who can win you matches. So we're going to stick to that as much as possible,” he added.
Marcus Stoinis, Maxwell's PBKS and Australia teammate, also corroborated it, saying that he injured his finger during training right before the rained-out match against KKR on April 26.
Stoinis said before the match vs CSK on Wednesday, “He didn't think it was too bad, but it ended up getting pretty bad. He had scans and, yeah, the results weren't great. So unfortunately for Maxi, I think it's likely he's out for the tournament.”
Lockie Ferguson, a pacer with PBKS, was similarly injured in April; his successor has not yet been announced. Ricky Ponting, the head coach of PBKS, confirmed, “We will be signing some replacements at some stage. We've got until our 12th game, so we have a couple of games to go yet. With the squad we've got, we're trying to find players in our squad anyway, we've got most basis covered. So we've got Azmatullah [Omarzai], Aaron Hardie, who hasn't played yet, Xavier Bartlett who didn't play today, it's conditions based. But when we get to Dharamsala he will come back into the reckoning up there, where the ball might swing and bounce a little bit more.”
Ponting also attributed PBKS's present lack of interest in finding replacements to the ongoing PSL 2025 in Pakistan.
“So we've actually been a little bit patient. Maxi's only been a couple of days, Lockie's has been two or three weeks. And with the PSL happening at the same time, there's not a lot of high-quality replacements out there, to be honest. So we've just been patient. We're having a look around at Indian talent as well and we're looking at what roles we might be able to fill with some younger Indian players. We'll actually take a couple of guys to Dharamsala with us, a couple of guys trained with us yesterday and they will come with us to Dharamsala, we'll have a closer look at them and they might find themselves with a Punjab contract going forward. It has to be this week, has to be before the 12th game, so stay tuned,” he said.
On May 4, PBKS will play their eleventh match against LSG, and they have nearly a week to choose their substitutes. On May 8, they play DC in the 12th game; both games will be played at Dharamshala.
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