Mo Bobat confirms Yash Dayal won't join squad, to remain under RCB contract

Yash Dayal won't be part of the Royal Challengers Bengaluru squad for IPL 2026, Mo Bobat, RCB's director of cricket, confirmed on Tuesday (March 24). With regards to Dayal's situation, Bobat stated that it was a "personal matter" while adding that the left-arm seamer continues to remain under contract with the franchise.

"Just to confirm that Yash will not be joining the squad. As you know, he's going through a personal situation. And just to clarify, we've been very supportive of Yash to date. And that's reflected in the fact that we retained him when we had the opportunity to either retain or release players. We wanted to retain him," said Bobat at a pre-tournament press conference in Bengaluru.

"And he remains under contract and will continue to, in the short term, be foreseeable to remain under contract. We are communicating with him regularly, and I spoke to him earlier today as well. But it's been decided that it is not in his best interest, or the franchise's best interest, for him to join RCB at this point.

"We won't be making any further comments on that at this stage. And that's probably all I've got to say on this situation, that he won't be joining RCB. But he obviously retains our support and remains under contract. And we'll continue to speak to him as he goes through his personal situation."

RCB also won't have the services of their star pacer Josh Hazlewood at the start of the tournament, with the Australian recovering from injury issues - hamstring and Achilles - that forced him to miss the Ashes and the T20 World Cup. Bobat said that the team is in constant communication with Cricket Australia regarding Hazlewood's fitness and are hoping that he will join the team soon.

"So, as most people would know, Josh has missed quite a bit of cricket recently with injuries. So he's currently working through a return to play programme. He's doing that in Australia currently. We are liaising very closely with both Josh and Cricket Australia. And our medical teams are collaborating very strongly on a day-to-day basis on this programme," said Bobat.

"We'll continue to communicate with him. And as soon as he gets to a point where Cricket Australia are happy, he'll come over. And we hope to have him with us very soon," he added.

The absence of Dayal, meanwhile, gives an opportunity for the other domestic bowlers to present their case, said Bobat, who spoke about options like Rasikh Salam, Mangesh Yadav and Abhinandan Singh.

"The Yash Dayal situation has been tricky because obviously it's been around for some time now. And it's difficult to predict what will happen. We went into our auction planning for a worse case scenario, that he may not be available for us. And so we have recruited accordingly. We have some excellent domestic fast bowlers in our squad.

"Rasikh, who many of you will know, had been under the rehab unit last year. And then we also signed Mangesh in this auction. So, domestically we have three excellent potential options that we're facing. So, it's obviously a blow using a player like Yash. That's obvious, he's been an important part of us for the last couple of years. But we're very confident in the options we've got in the squad. And we will select a team accordingly," said Bobat.