Vijay Shankar walks away from Indian cricket at 35 to chase a franchise passport
Vijay Shankar has stepped away from Indian domestic cricket and the IPL at 35, ending a career that produced 21 white-ball India caps and 78 IPL appearances, and clearing the way for him to chase a longer tail abroad in overseas franchise leagues.
The seam-bowling all-rounder confirmed the decision on Instagram on Friday, saying he wanted to "pursue new opportunities and play more cricket". The line that grabbed the headlines came next. "I have faced unreal hate and negativity," he wrote, adding that he had chosen to "ignore and move forward". Reports from Sri Lanka have already linked him to the Lanka Premier League later this year.
A short India career that carried a long shadow
Shankar's India window was narrow but loud. He played 12 ODIs and nine T20Is between 2018 and 2019, with 223 ODI runs at an average of 31.85 and 101 T20I runs at 25.25. The marker most fans still attach to his name came at the 2019 ODI World Cup in England, where he took a wicket with his very first ball at the tournament against Pakistan and walked into a global conversation he did not always want to be in.
The flip side of that selection was the bigger story. Shankar was picked at number four in a World Cup squad that pointedly did not contain Ambati Rayudu, and the "three-dimensional" tag that MSK Prasad used to defend the call followed him every time he failed in coloured clothing. India's exit in the semi-final against New Zealand at Old Trafford pulled the entire experiment down with it.
A first-class record that the noise often drowned out
The domestic ledger reads differently. Shankar made 4,253 first-class runs at 46.73 with 13 hundreds and 23 fifties in 77 matches, and took 43 wickets along the way. He added 2,790 List A runs at 34.87 and 2,583 T20 runs at 26.09 and a strike rate of 128.37. Across 78 IPL games for Chennai Super Kings, Sunrisers Hyderabad, Delhi Capitals and Gujarat Titans, he made 1,233 runs and picked up nine wickets, with a 2022 title in Ahmedabad on the resume too. He was also a regular fixture in Tamil Nadu sides that fought their way deep into the domestic rounds.
One small line from his retirement note matters more than the headline. He listed bowling the final over at India's 500th ODI victory in Nagpur as a career highlight, the kind of marker only a cricket lifer would think to mention.
The next chapter is a franchise passport
Indian players are barred from foreign T20 leagues while they are registered as domestic cricketers in the BCCI system, which is the constraint Shankar has just released himself from. The LPL window opens in July, the CPL runs from late August into September, and the Big Bash, MLC and ILT20 sit further out on the calendar. At 35, with a first-class average just under 47 and a frame that still bowls eight overs of medium pace when asked, Shankar fits the profile that franchise scouts hunt every off-season.
He never quite became the Indian all-rounder the 2019 selection was built around. But the body of work he is taking with him into the franchise circuit is bigger than the scoreboard from one World Cup, and the negativity he is walking away from is, by his own count, the price of having tried.
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