Chennai Super Kings have retained MS Dhoni, Suresh Raina and Ravindra Jadeja for the 2018 edition of the Indian Premier League.

Mahendra Singh Dhoni and Suresh Raina officially returned to Chennai Super Kings on Thursday at the IPL 2018 Player Retention event. Ravindra Jadeja was also retained by CSK which will return to Indian Premier League after a gap of two years.

The Whistle Podu’s have decided to retain their mercurial captain, with whom they have won two trophies and made four finals in the Indian Premier League.

Dhoni had always maintained his love for the franchise and vice-versa and the fans can finally see him play for them again.

CSK will pay Rs 15 crore to Dhoni for his services. Raina and Jadeja, the other two retained players, will get Rs 11 crore and Rs 7 crore respectively.

Dhoni started his IPL journey as the captain of the CSK from the league’s inaugural season in 2008. Dhoni has led CSK in 129 matches with victories coming in 78 of them.

He is also one of the only three captains to have won the cash-rich T20 league at least twice. Gautam Gambhir (twice) and Rohit Sharma (thrice) are the other two.

Under him, CSK won the IPL in 2010 and 2011 while the Champions League in 2010 and 2014. CSK also finished runners-up four times in the IPL.

After CSK was suspended for two seasons in 2016 and 2017 due to IPL 2013 fixing and betting scandal, Dhoni played for Rising Pune Supergiant. But he failed to weave the magic of his CSK stint at RPS. He could only manage five wins out of the 14 matches and the franchise finished seventh in the eight-team tournament in the team’s debut season in 2016.

This led to Dhoni’s removal from captaincy and the reins were handed over to Australia’s Steve Smith for the 2017 season.

Like Dhoni, the left-hand bat Raina also played for the other franchise — Gujarat Lions — for two seasons but he captained the side in both the editions.

While in 2016 Raina-led Lions topped the table in the league stage, the next season the team finished seventh in the eight-team tournament.

Raina is the all-time leading run-scorer in the IPL with 4540 runs. He is currently 122 runs ahead of Virat Kohli (4418 runs), who was also retained by Royal Challengers Bangalore.

IPL 2018 AUCTION AND OTHER DETAILS

The mega auction will be held in Bengaluru on January 27 and 28.

The salary cap was raised for the 11th edition of the lucrative IPL. For the coming season, it’s fixed at Rs 80 crore and will increase to Rs 82 and 85 crore respectively in 2019 and 2020.

The minimum spend has been fixed at 75 per cent of the salary cap for each season.

The player retention price guideline for salary cap charged has also been set as Rs 33 crore (for 3 players pre auction), Rs 21 crore (for 2 players pre auction) and Rs 12.5 crore (for 1 player retained pre-auction).

For those franchises who have retained one or two players, they get three RTM cards, if they have kept three, then they get two RTM cards.

Each squad can consist of a maximum number of 25 players (up to 8 overseas players) and a minimum of 18.

Here is the full list of retained players:

Chennai Super Kings — MS Dhoni, Suresh Raina, Ravindra Jadeja

Sunrisers Hyderabad — David Warner, Bhuvneshwar Kumar

Kings XI Punjab — Axar Patel

Kolkata Knight Riders — Sunil Narine, Andre Russell

Royal Challengers Bangalore — Virat Kohli, AB de Villiers, Sarfaraz Khan

Rajasthan Royals — Steve Smith

Mumbai Indians — Rohit Sharma, Hardik Pandya, Jasprit Bumrah

Delhi Daredevils — Rishabh Pant, Shreyas Iyer, Chris Morris