RCB set to retain majority of IPL 2023 squad and release West Indies all-rounder Sherfane Rutherford ahead of the auction

The headline, in one paragraph

On the evening of 15 November 2022, the ANI news wire carried a short pre-auction dispatch that was republished in full by The News Mill. The takeaway read simply: Royal Challengers Bangalore were set to retain the bulk of their squad ahead of the IPL 2023 mini-auction, keep all six overseas players on their books, release West Indies all-rounder Sherfane Rutherford, and trade Australian left-arm pacer Jason Behrendorff to Mumbai Indians. The domestic core — Virat Kohli included — was expected to stay largely intact. Three years of playoff cricket without a title framed every decision in the dispatch, and the report treated the retention list as a vote of confidence in the staff that had taken the franchise that far.

The News Mill added the standard ANI disclaimer that it was not responsible for the editorial content of the wire copy. The IPL coverage desk treats that as the right read: the underlying facts are ANI's, and the dispatch was filed before the retention window formally closed. Anyone re-reading the report today is reading a snapshot of intent, not a confirmed auction outcome — the gap between the two is the reason the desk flags the date in the headline.

Read this first: the four numbers from the dispatch

Where RCB had just come from

The frame around the retention call

Three straight playoff finishes without a trophy leave a franchise caught between continuity and change. The 15 November dispatch came down clearly on the continuity side.

Royal Challengers Bangalore had finished the IPL 2022 league stage inside the playoff cut and exited at the Eliminator. That was the third successive season the franchise had reached the knockout phase. It was also the third successive season in which the franchise left the tournament without an IPL trophy. The combination — proof of regular-season competitiveness alongside an absence of the deeper result — is the standard pressure pattern on a senior roster when the retention window opens, and the dispatch was written with that pressure visible in every paragraph.

Faf du Plessis had taken the captaincy in IPL 2022 after the franchise parted ways with the previous leadership group, and the South African's first season in charge produced the playoff finish the brief asked for. The decision to keep him in the role for IPL 2023 — implicit in any plan to retain him rather than trade him — was the dispatch's clearest signal that the franchise wanted to extend the existing setup rather than reset it. The IPL coverage desk treats that as the single most important fact in the original report, because it set the tone for everything else that followed.

The six overseas players RCB planned to keep

Six names were listed in the dispatch as the overseas core the franchise intended to take into the IPL 2023 retention window. Each of them had a defined role inside the XI the previous season, and each of them was being kept for a different reason. Reading them in the order the report used, the logic of the retention call comes through cleanly.

Faf du Plessis — South Africa · captain

The IPL 2022 captaincy was du Plessis's first full season in charge of an IPL franchise. He had previously led Chennai Super Kings to the title in IPL 2021, and the move to Royal Challengers Bangalore at the IPL 2022 mega-auction was framed as a fresh start for a player whose batting remained well above the league average for an anchor. The dispatch treated his retention as the foundation of the entire retention plan: if the captain was being kept, the rest of the structure was being kept around him.

Glenn Maxwell — Australia

Maxwell had finished the IPL 2022 league stage as one of the higher-impact middle-order batters in the league on a per-innings basis, with a strike rate that sat well above the middle-overs average. The dispatch's read of Maxwell was that his role — middle-overs acceleration against pace and spin — was the role the franchise could least afford to lose if they were serious about competing again. His retention was therefore presented as a near-formality.

Wanindu Hasaranga — Sri Lanka

Hasaranga's first IPL season, in 2022, produced the kind of wicket-tally that established him as the franchise's lead spin option through the middle overs. The dispatch's retention call here was partly about the bowling and partly about the batting depth he added in the lower middle order. With Yuzvendra Chahal having left the franchise ahead of the previous mega-auction, the spin-all-rounder slot was the one RCB could not afford to leave empty.

Josh Hazlewood — Australia

Hazlewood had been RCB's lead pace bowler for the bulk of the previous cycle, and the dispatch treated him as the bowler around whom the powerplay and death-overs plans were likely to be drawn. A pace bowler of his profile does not transfer easily, and the retention call was a straightforward value decision.

Finn Allen — New Zealand

Allen had joined the franchise mid-cycle as an injury replacement and played out the back end of IPL 2022 in the top order. The dispatch listed him among the six overseas players the franchise intended to retain, treating him as a long-term batting option even though his sample size was small. The retention was a forward-looking bet on a young batter the franchise had invested time in assessing.

David Willey — England

Willey was the third seam-bowling option in the dispatch's overseas list, and the one whose role was the most clearly defined: a powerplay seam-bowling all-rounder who could also bat at six or seven when the surface demanded it. The dispatch treated his retention as a balance call — left-arm pace, powerplay wickets, and a batting option lower down the order.

Why Sherfane Rutherford was the one name on the way out

Sherfane Rutherford was the only overseas name the dispatch placed on the release list. A West Indies all-rounder who had been bought at the IPL 2022 auction, Rutherford played out the season in a middle-order role without breaking into the kind of impact-innings form the franchise needed. The dispatch framed the call as a workload decision: with Hasaranga, Maxwell and Willey already providing all-round cover, the franchise did not need a fourth seam-bowling all-rounder slot, and the middle-order batting did not produce the volume the franchise's retention math required.

Releases in the IPL retention window are rarely framed as one player's fault. They are framed as squad-construction calls, and the dispatch used exactly that framing — Rutherford's name was on the way out because the role he was bought to fill was being filled by someone the franchise was not willing to move. The IPL coverage desk treats the release as a clean squad-math decision rather than a verdict on Rutherford as a cricketer.

The Behrendorff-to-Mumbai-Indians trade

The trade that closed the overseas reshuffle

Trading Jason Behrendorff to Mumbai Indians freed up a left-arm-pace overseas slot and gave RCB a clean four-overseas-shape to take into the auction room.

The second move the dispatch flagged was the trade of Australian left-arm pacer Jason Behrendorff to Mumbai Indians. Behrendorff had been part of the franchise's wider squad planning through the previous cycle, and the trade was framed as a clean swap of an overseas slot the franchise did not intend to use. Mumbai Indians, who had gone through their own retool at the mega-auction, were a natural counterparty for a left-arm-pacer slot.

Trades between IPL franchises in the retention window are usually written up in similar language: a player who was surplus to requirements at one end, and a franchise at the other end with both the slot and a specific role to fill. The dispatch used exactly that framing and did not speculate on the financial terms of the trade — the IPL's trade-window rules treat consideration between franchises as confidential unless the league itself publishes it, and the report respected that boundary.

The Indian core, with Kohli still in it

The dispatch's headline-grabber, outside the overseas list, was the line that the franchise expected to retain most of its Indian domestic core — Virat Kohli explicitly included. Three things mattered about that line.

First, Kohli's name. The former India captain had relinquished the RCB captaincy ahead of IPL 2022 and played the season as a senior batter in the top order. His retention was the clearest possible signal that the franchise was not entertaining a phase where Kohli was no longer a Royal Challenger.

Second, the language was "most of," not "all of." The dispatch did not name the domestic players on the way out, and a careful reader will treat that as a gap in the original reporting rather than a gap to be filled later by the desk.

Third, the retention list was the most stable part of the entire plan. The overseas decisions could be reframed as the auction approached; the domestic core, by contrast, was the part the franchise intended to leave alone. The dispatch framed that as a vote of confidence in the existing Indian match-day group — the bowlers who had delivered the playoff finishes, the batters who had anchored the powerplays, and the all-rounders who had filled the lower middle order.

What the 15 November report stated clearly — and what it did not

A retrospective is only as honest as its handling of the gaps in the original report. The dispatch was clear on six things: the six overseas retentions, the release of Rutherford, the trade of Behrendorff to Mumbai Indians, the continuity of the Indian domestic core, the playoff record the franchise was carrying into the cycle, and the timing of the report in the run-up to the retention window.

It was not clear on five things. It did not name the Indian players the franchise might release. It did not specify the financial terms of the Behrendorff trade. It did not disclose the head coach or support staff the franchise intended to retain alongside the playing group. It did not say whether the franchise was planning to use the Right-to-Match card on any specific released player. And it did not name the auction targets the franchise had begun to scout — that information does not leak into a pre-retention dispatch under any normal set of circumstances, and the report respected that boundary.

The IPL coverage desk reads the dispatch as the foundation of the IPL 2023 cycle rather than the complete picture of it. The auction, the squad list that came out of it, and the eventual playing XIs the franchise fielded over the season are the parts of the story this dispatch did not pretend to settle.

Where it left the projected IPL 2023 lineup

Reading the dispatch as a squad-construction document rather than a finished XI gives a cleaner picture of what the franchise was planning. The projected shape was a four-overseas XI built around du Plessis at the top, Maxwell in the middle, Hasaranga as the spin-bowling all-rounder, and Hazlewood as the lead pace bowler. Willey and Allen sat behind that core as the next-in-line overseas options, depending on surface and opponent.

The Indian core — Kohli as the senior batting anchor, alongside the rest of the domestic group the dispatch said the franchise intended to keep — was meant to provide the batting depth the overseas shape could not provide on its own. The dispatch did not pick the batting order, but it left enough clues to suggest the franchise expected to open with du Plessis, anchor the powerplay around him, and let Maxwell and Hasaranga control the middle-overs acceleration. Kohli's role inside that shape was the one the dispatch treated as settled even before the auction opened.

Editor-answered questions on the RCB IPL 2023 retention plan

What to read next on the IPL beat

• Read the original ANI dispatch as republished by The News Mill on 15 November 2022, under the headline that frames this retrospective.
• Walk through the franchise's IPL 2023 auction picks and squad list — those landed after the retention window the dispatch covered.
• Compare the projected XI the dispatch implied with the playing XIs the franchise actually fielded across IPL 2023, particularly the powerplay and middle-overs balance.
• Track the longer arc: three straight playoff finishes without a title, and the way the franchise treated retention as a vote of confidence in the staff that had taken them that far.

For the wider IPL beat, this is a story about how a franchise handled a retention window under the weight of three straight playoff finishes without a trophy. The on-field results that came after the dispatch are a separate story, and the IPL coverage desk reads them through that lens. [Return to IPL coverage for the live desk.]

Source attribution

This retrospective is built on The News Mill's 15 November 2022 republication of the ANI news wire dispatch, filed under the headline "IPL 2023: RCB set to retain majority of squad, will reportedly release WI's Sherfane Rutherford." The wire copy is the factual record for this article; the framing, prose and editorial structure are the IPL coverage desk's.