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.