The millionaire cricketers
England’s Stokes and Mills land staggering IPL deals
In a previous era Tymal Mills would be a retired cricketer by now, regretting his body let him down just as he was on the verge of the big time. But instead he is celebrating becoming an overnight millionaire in the Indian Premier League auction after landing a life-changing contract with Bangalore worth £1.4 million.
Mills was part of an English invasion of the IPL as six players were picked up, the most ever from this country, with Ben Stokes becoming the most expensive overseas signing of all time when he was bought by Rising Pune Supergiants for £1.7million, making him the highest-paid English cricketer of all time when his England contracts, worth an estimated £880,000 before win bonuses and appearance fees, are taken into account.
Mills lives at a sharper end of life as a Twenty20 freelancer for hire surviving on short contracts playing for Sussex in the NatWest Blast and then around the world, defying security advice to play in the Bangladesh Premier League in November. He is currently in Dubai playing for the Quetta Gladiators in the Pakistan Super League and only the very hard-hearted would begrudge him this big break. He took a punt putting himself in the auction at the base price of £60,000, hoping to speculate to accumulate.
Now he will earn in little over a month almost as much as Joe Root does in a year after becoming the most expensive specialist bowler in IPL history.
It is a remarkable turn of events for a player who thought his career was over two years ago aged only 22 when a degenerative back injury was diagnosed. It ended his red-ball career and his body cannot stand up to 50-over cricket either. A decade ago that would have meant the end, perhaps a benefit match and then life in civvy street pursuing his ambition to become a sports journalist. But Twenty20 offers a new start, and a far more lucrative one at that, especially for a player such as Mills, who has the rare twin gifts of being able to bowl at 94mph and to do it left-handed.
He got lucky, too. Specialists rather than bits and pieces allrounders are in vogue in the IPL. Bowling at Virat Kohli in the Twenty20 series for England last month must have helped and so, too, the fact that Australian left-arm pace bowler Mitchell Starc, who plays for Bangalore, is unavailable. Bangalore is one of the quickest pitches in India, and Mills will be playing alongside cricketing royalty: Kohli is captain and the side features Chris Gayle and A B De Villiers.
“I can’t believe it. I did not see this coming and it took a while for it to sink in,” said Mills. “It has been a crazy day. I was up at 8.30am and put the auction on TV. When my turn came I was pretty nervous. I just wanted to get picked up.
“I was the lowest of the base prices because I just wanted to get picked up by a team. I didn’t want to wait until July for my next cricket, which would have been the NatWest T20 Blast.
“When my name came up I was nervous, giddy and jumpy. I was on Facetime with my best mate and he just kept shouting. The bidding was quite slow but once it hit 10 crore [£1.2 million] I knew it was big money, but it kept going. When it finished I did not know how much it was worth. When I worked it out I could not believe it; it did not seem real. It’s an amount of money that can change your life. It will for me.”
The IPL talks in crores and lakhs, the Indian method of shortening vast sums of rupees. A crore is 10 million rupees, a lakh 100,000, so all England players needed a calculator as they got up in the early hours yesterday to learn their fate in the auction room in Bangalore.
Chris Woakes landed a deal of £500,000 with Kolkata Knight Riders, Jason Roy was signed by Gujarat Lions for £120,000 and Eoin Morgan for £240,000 by Kings XI Punjab, his fourth different IPL side. Chris Jordan was signed in the second round of bidding, going to Sunrisers Hyderabad for £60,000, but Jonny Bairstow and Alex Hales were left unsold. Jos Buttler (Mumbai Indians) and Sam Billings (Delhi Daredevils) already had IPL deals from last year.
“I set my alarm for 3.30, got up and waited about 40 minutes for my turn in the auction. I had to follow it on Twitter,” said Stokes. “There were so many tweets on it that it was hard to keep up. I wasn’t sure how much a crore was, people were retweeting stuff – it was complete carnage. It’s a life-changing amount of money.”