"Didn't want to play domestic cricket, didn't have that inspiration from inside" - Shikhar Dhawan on announcing retirement

Former India opener Shikhar Dhawan has said he decided to retire because he didn't have the inspiration to go back to domestic cricket to push for a comeback to the Indian team. He explained he was only playing the Indian Premier League (IPL) over the last couple of years, which wasn't a lot of cricket.

Having last represented India in December 2022, Dhawan announced his retirement from all forms of cricket in August 2024. The 38-year-old featured in 34 Tests, 167 ODIs and 68 T20Is, scoring over 10,800 runs. Towards the end of his career, though, he was only part of the ODI format and was dropped after a poor series in Bangladesh.

Speaking to PTI on the sidelines of the Legends League Cricket, the left-handed batter opened up on the key reason behind his decision to retire. He explained:

"I didn't want to play domestic cricket, which I started playing at the age of 18 or 19 and I didn't have that inspiration from inside to play that (form of) cricket."

"If I look back, the last two years of my cricketing career, I wasn't playing much of international cricket and I was playing IPL to IPL, so I wasn't playing much of cricket (overall)," the prolific former opening batter added.

Dhawan represented the Indian team in the 2015 and 2019 ODI World Cups and was the Player of the Tournament when the Men in Blue won the Champions Trophy in 2013 in England.

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"I was very happy and satisfied and content with whatever I achieved in my career" - Dhawan

The veteran southpaw captained Punjab Kings (PBKS) in IPL 2024. However, his tournament was cut short due to injury. He played five matches, scoring 152 runs at an average of 30.40 and a strike rate of 125.62, with a best of 70.

Dhawan said that since he wasn't playing a lot of cricket and was content with what he had achieved, he decided to call it quits.

"I thought that, 'alright, I've played enough, and I need to give it a break because I'm not playing that much cricket, so you lose the touch as well. I thought that continuing IPL and just coming up with two, three months of hard work won't be enough for me to go and play," he said.

"So that was the reason for me to just call it off, and yeah, I was very happy and satisfied and content with whatever I achieved in my career, and very, very grateful for everything," the 38-year-old added.

Dhawan is the second-highest run-getter in the history of the IPL. In 222 matches, he smashed 6,769 runs at an average of 35.26 and a strike rate of 127.14, with the aid of two hundreds and 51 half-centuries.