Huge honour for Chennai: Smashers CEO

Smashers CEO Kalaiarasan said the team didn’t want to leave out Sindhu for three reasons. “According to us, Sindhu is a Chennai girl. We wanted her in Smashers as she is the captain and more importantly we owe a lot to her father Ramana for helping us out in the last season. He was our team manager and helped us manage the entire logistics during the league,” Kalaiarasan said. 

The CEO said a lot of hard work and research went before the auctions. “We were the last team in the previous season and we didn’t know anything about the auctions last year. We just went and got a team and we then we went on understanding the players’ strength and weakness and then devised a strategy. We lost a lot of time in that. We didn’t want to make the same mistake again this year. We did a lot of research on the players available, their fitness, their injuries and prepared ourselves well. We got what we wanted and we are happy. We are moving in the right direction so far,” Kalaiarasan added. 

According to the CEO, they are looking forward to seeing the big names in the sport play in Chennai. “We have 17 Olympians in the league. It is a huge honour for the city to host so many big names. We missed playing at home last year as the city was ravaged by floods and relief materials were stocked up  in the stadiums. We do not have those issues this year. We are tentatively looking at January 10, 11 and 12 to stage the matches here,” Kalaiarasan said. 

Chennai Smashers pulled off a surprise by including an uncapped local player in Ramya Tulasi. “We didn’t want to come across as a team with no local background. The team owner, Vijay Prabhakaran, and I were feeling guilty of having no local connect and we met many state coaches and zeroed in on Ramya. She is already excited and practising very hard,” Kalaiarasan concluded.