With stars like Rishabh Pant and K L Rahul up for grabs, many IPL team owners will be rubbing their hands in glad anticipation at the upcoming players’ auction which promises to create all-time record deals given the available Indian talent in the pool. Aside from Pant and Rahul, there will be Shreyas Iyer, Arshdeep Singh, Washington Sundar, Mohammed Siraj and Mohammed Shami also in the auction pool. All of them can trigger bidding wars but let there be no confusion that Pant will be cynosure of all eyes at the two-day event supposed to be held in third week of December.
The Rs 75 crore retention cap on international players coupled with Right To Match cards will certainly make it an intriguing auction as some teams, which have exhausted their retention quotas, will now have to recruit at least 15 more players for a lesser sum.
But a few others like Punjab Kings (Rs 110.5 crore) and Royal Challengers Bengaluru (Rs 83 crore) will be making some insane bids.
Never before in an auction has one witnessed three IPL captains back in the pool — Pant of Delhi Capitals, defending champions KKR’s Iyer and Lucknow Super Giants’ KL Rahul.
In case of Pant, more than money, he was not happy about his powers being curbed by GMR, the co-owners, who will run the show for the next two years. He was also,it is learnt, not happy with Hemang Badani as head coach and Y Venugopal Rao as Team Director.
In case of Iyer, he felt that as an IPL-winning captain, he deserved way more than his Rs 12.25 crore existing salary, a belief that was not shared by the KKR bosses.
As for Rahul, his approach towards T20 cricket didn’t match with what the LSG owners wanted.
All three will definitely get deals but Pant could well emerge as the highest paid player of Indian Premier League if Punjab Kings, known for breaking banks every two years while shopping for a new captain and ‘X-factor’, decide to go for him.
“Rishabh’s real bidding will start from Rs 20 crore onwards. There will be three teams who can afford to bid big for him. One is Punjab Kings with Rs 110.5 crore in its kitty. They need a new captain and a brand. RCB has Rs 83 crore and LSG have Rs 69 crore and they also need a new captain,” a top official of a franchise told PTI.
“Gujarat Titans don’t need a captain but they also have Rs 69 crore. DC has Rs 73 crore but why would they go for someone, they released under acrimonious circumstances,” he added.
While Suresh Raina might have raised hopes of CSK fans about Pant joining Dhoni but with Rs 55 crore, they can hardly even get to a ballpark figure and N Srinivasan’s team doesn’t function on whims and fancies.
The industry insiders expect Pant to get anything between Rs 25 crore to Rs 30 crore.
Topics mentioned in this article
