IPL auction: Australia’s 13 and Chawla’s pay cheque
Kolkata, India - As many as 338 players went into the IPL 2020 auction looking to find buyers for 73 spots across teams on Thursday. Only 62 of them succeeded, with all teams filling up their eight overseas spots.
Capped Indian players found the going tough, with at least nine of them not finding a buyer at the auction, Yusuf Pathan and Hanuma Vihari being the prominent ones.
There was not a single Indian millionaire at the auction, partly due to the number of Indian names retained by franchises, leading to a shallower pool than usual. It was Piyush Chawla - to widespread surprise - who came closest to the million-dollar mark, attracting a ($0.95mn) bid from the already spin-rich Chennai Super Kings.
Kolkata Knight Riders, too, threw up a surprise with its bid to welcome back IPL's veteran of veterans, the 48 year old Pravin Tambe.
Pat Cummins led the way on a memorable evening for Australia at the IPL auction
It would be Australia's evening out through and through, led by Pat Cummins who became the most expensive overseas buy in IPL history, at (US$2.18mn).
He was one of three millionaires from Australia, along with Glenn Maxwell (Kings XI Punjab) and Nathan Coulter-Nile (Mumbai Indians).
As many as 13 Australians found a team - Aaron Finch moved to his eighth different IPL side. If it was Australia's day at the top end, some prominent New Zealand stars found themselves without a team this time - the likes of Colin Munro, Martin Guptill, Ish Sodhi, Colin de Grandhomme and Adam
Milne, to name just four players from IPLs past.
While every franchise had an increased purse of this time (taking the total to
few used it up, with Kings XI Punjab assembling a 25-man unit at just 80 per cent of its purse value. And thanks to Cummins' price and some smart late bargain buys, Kolkata was the biggest spenders of the evening.
Last year's millionaire Varun Chakravarthy, sidelined by injuries and smarting from a forgettable start to his IPL career, found a buyer in Kolkata for ($0.56 mn).
Teenage sensation Yashasvi Jaiswal was bought at 12 times his base price by Rajasthan Royals, on the back of a stellar limited-overs domestic season. Kings XI, meanwhile, went all out to get India U19 leg-spinner Ravi Bishnoi for
($0.28 mn).
The leader, though, was Sheldon Cottrell, comfortably going past the million-dollar mark from a base price of $0.07mn ( to Kings XI Punjab.
Chennai Super winning bid of only makes Sam Curran something of a value buy. Alex Carey went to Delhi Capitals for
Chennai, which had very few spots to fill, showed it was prepared to go the distance to snap up Chawla. The wrist-spinner turns 31 next week and hasn't been in the best of form in recent seasons, but that didn't stop it from paying mm for him.
The big-hitting Alex Hales, Evin Lewis and Yusuf Pathan, overseas spinners Ish Sodhi and Adam Zampa, and IPL veterans like Shaun Marsh make quite an XI, but none of them could find a buyer this time around.
Kings'