‘And Faf ticked all those boxes’: Coach Mike Hesson explains why Faf du Plessis was picked as RCB captain

Royal Challengers Bangalore’s (RCB) Director of Cricket Operations Mike Hesson has opened up on Faf du Plessis as the choice for the team’s captaincy. In an RCB podcast, he shared how difficult it was to bring in the new captain when the former captain was still in the playing XI.
“I guess it’s really difficult coming into a group when the previous captain is still there. So we needed somebody that could come in, would have respect within the group instantly because if he comes in a lot of people can be intimidated the ex-captain being near and potentially aren’t confident enough to make your own decisions,” Hesson said.
The former South African skipper Faf was announced as RCB’s captain on March 12, 2022. The 38-year-old veteran batsman, who has been part of the CSK for many years and also opened the batting for them, was among the top buys for RCB which bought 19 players at the IPL Mega Auction.
“So we wanted somebody who had captained at an international level before ideally, somebody that had respect from amongst the the Indian players and the international players. That was really important that it wasn’t just somebody that would take a year to be in. We felt that at RCB we needed someone to hit the ground running.

We wanted a player who we knew could plug and play from a performance point of view. So somebody that had a really good record in the IPL in recent years and Faf clearly had that. And also would work well with the coach and the coaching group because we wanted that inclusive style. Somebody that we had a lot of good senior players Virat, Maxi (Glenn Maxwell) DK (Dinesh Karthik) that we were looking to either bring in or retain. So we needed to use those skills rather than just be an authoritarian style captain. We want to someone who will actually come and work with that group. And Faf ticked all those boxes,” Hesson said.
Du Plessis was handed over the cap team’s chairman Prathmesh Mishra and director cricket operations Mike Hesson in a virtual event.
“I’m deeply grateful for the opportunity. I have played a lot of IPL and understand the dynamics of the game. It’s no small thing to trust an overseas player,” Du Plessis, who gave up South African captaincy across all formats in 2020, had said while accepting the RCB captaincy last year.

Du Plessis has so far played 118 IPL matches and scored 3561 runs in 112 Innings. He scored 633 runs for CSK in 2022’s IPL-winning campaign.
The RCB captaincy had fallen vacant when previous captain Virat Kohli had announced before the start of the 2021 season that it would be his last as the franchise’s skipper. His announcement came just days after he had said that he would be stepping down as India’s T20I captain ahead of the T20 World Cup.