Dale Steyn close to inking BBL deal with Melbourne Stars

South Africa’s pace bowling star Dale Steyn shocked the world a few months back when he announced his retirement from Test cricket in order to prolong his career in the limited-overs. However, he was not picked for the South Africa tour to India where they will play three T20I matches and therefore, he has been looking elsewhere for T20 assignments.

A place where Dale Steyn could be moving to next is the Big Bash League in Australia. Steyn, who retired from Tests with 439 wickets in 93 matches with best bowling figures of 7/51. He currently has 196 ODI wickets from 125 matches and 61 wickets in 44 encounters. He has been struggling with injuries recently, which kept him out of the game for a year in 2017 and then got injured again on his return in 2018.

Melbourne Stars negotiating with Steyn

The 36-year-old has shown a keen interest in featuring in the upcoming franchise-based competition in Australia. As per reports on sacricketmag.com, the Melbourne based franchise-Melbourne Stars are close to signing the Proteas legend and negotiations are still going on. However, salary will be an issue as Steyn is slated to play in the Bangladesh Premier League as well.

If Stars sign Steyn, he will miss a big part of the competition, despite him expressing a desire to play the last six games for the team. This year’s BBL will run from December 17 to February 8 – one week shorter than last season. The franchise has Nepal’s Sandeep Lamichhane as one foreign player, but need to fill one more vacancy to fill in order to replace Dwayne Bravo.

The next international assignment for Dale Steyn might be the ODI series at home against England, given CSA give him the call. This conundrum over his place in the national side has led to the pacer looking for T20 deals all over the world. Steyn missed the ICC World Cup 2019 after failing to recover from a shoulder problem he suffered during the IPL 2019, where he played two matches for Royal Challengers Bangalore.

If the Stars manage to sign the South African star, it would prove to be a huge marketing and business boost for the franchise and will also help with the rating for the host broadcaster given his crazy following amongst the cricket crazy fans all over the world.