While the IPL 2025 is less than a week away to start, Shardul Thakur has stunned everyone with his possible return to the tournament, which is currently working silently.

Shardul Thakur is a popular name in IPL 

The 33-year-old Indian pacer Shardul Thakur is one of the popular faces in the Indian Premier League. Previously, serving for five different teams and one of the most popular faces for Chennai Super Kings, Thakur recorded 94 wickets in 95 IPL matches. Despite his strong experience, Thakur was unsold in the mega auctions for the IPL 2025. The seventh leading wicket-taker for CSK (60 wickets in 57 games) struggled in the last two seasons by picking up 12 wickets in last 18 IPL innings, including five wickets in nine games of the IPL 2024.   

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Shardul Thakur was in great all-round form in recent domestic cricket, including among top 5 leading wicket-takers in the T20 tournament SMAT

Althogh Thakur remained unsold in the mega auctions, he was in the good news in domestic season. In the Syed Mushtaq Ali Trophy 2024-25, Thakur finished as the joint third leading wicket-taker with 15 wickets in nine games. In the Vijay Hazare Trophy 2024-25, the right-arm pacer collected 10 wickets in seven fixtures, and he scored 132 runs in four innings as a right-handed lower-order batter, including the innings of 43 and 73 not out. Most importantly, Thakur had a 148.31 strike rate in the latest Vijay Hazare Trophy season where he hit seven fours and 10 sixes. 

Thakur played important all-rounder role for Mumbai in the Ranji Trophy 2024-25, where the defending champions reached the Semi-final. In that domestic red-ball competition, Thakur not only took 35 wickets in nine matches, including one six-fer, he also scored 505 runs in 12 innings with an average of 42.08, including one century and four half-centuries. He was the second most wicket-taker and second leading run-scorer for his team in the latest Ranji Trophy season. 

LSG have serious injury news in the pace bowling 

Meanwhile, Lucknow Super Giants currently have some injury news in their pace bowling line-ups. They have the injured pacers Mayank Yadav, Mohsin Khan, and Avesh Khan. Also, the Australian pace-bowling all-rounder Mitchell Marsh has recently confirmed that he will be available for the IPL 2025 as a batter. Due to his back injury, Marsh is unlikely to bowl in the IPL 2025. 

On the other hand, in a recent image, Shardul Thakur has been seen to bowl wearing Lucknow Super Giants' training kit. Although there is no official news yet, it is not a surprising to see in-form experienced pace-bowling all-rounder Thakur in the LSG team, where some top Indian pace-bowling names are injured.