Former South Africa captain AB de Villiers has defended young players for picking franchise cricket over Test cricket.
While talking about the Ishan Kishan saga, De Villiers said that with too much cricket around, it human reaction for players to pick what is important for them.
“Very interesting scenario there in India and I’ve been through this quite a bit throughout my career as well. It’s a very tricky situation. Players trying to manage their careers, and rightfully so, but the difficulty around this is that there are a lot of T20 leagues around the world, IPL, and it’s taking up a lot of attention of the player’s focus is on that”, AB de Villiers said on his YouTube channel.
However, the former Proteas skipper pointed out that Test cricket is still the ultimate format.
“The ultimate format of the game is still Test cricket and all Test-playing nations really wanna look after the Test format, so there’s a bit of force in all kinds of directions here. Guys do run out of energy, and once you run out of energy, you tend to go in your defensive mode and into a shell where you look after what you feel is important to you, and that’s a human reaction”, De Villers further added.
Notably, Ishan Kishan returned from India’s South Africa tour midway citing mental fatigue. The wicketkeeper-batter also skipped the Ranji Trophy games for Jharkhand is reportedly eyeing his return with DY Patil T20 tournament.
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