Pacers are the flavour on a slow day

Bengaluru: Not a lot of money was spent because not a lot of money was left, but Monday’s auction threw the window open and allowed us into the minds of franchise leaders and their prep work for yet another edition of the Indian Premier League.

After a whirlwind of an opening day at the auction in Jeddah where a few select cricketers made more money than most people wouldn’t in a lifetime, the second day saw a more sedate staging.

The most expensive purchase on the day was Bhuvneshwar Kumar who was picked up by the Royal Challengers Bengaluru for Rs 10.75 crore followed by Mumbai Indians’ purchase of Deepak Chahar for Rs 9.25 crore. Juxtapose this with Rishabh Pant, Shreyas Iyer and Venkatesh Iyer collecting a combined Rs 77.25 crore and you get the picture.

But, the good thing with teams having to work on a budget is that they tend to strip the fat in the skills they desire and get to picking players who fulfil their needs, rather than wants.

Perhaps that sensibility wasn’t adopted by the Rajasthan Royals when they bought 13-year-old Vaibhav Suryavanshi for Rs 1.1 crore. But, in this case, it goes with their identity as a franchise, which has been a finishing school for talent since the days of their inception. Suryavanshi, thus, became the youngest player to be picked at the auction, but the Royals didn’t pick the boy for his saleability.

Suryavanshi is a serious talent, and if getting into the Ranji Trophy set up for Bihar at the age of 12 doesn’t convey that, the century he scored against Australia’s Under-19 side in Chennai recently should. 

Under Rahul Dravid’s tutelage, it’s quite likely that Suryavanshi will use this platform to set himself up for the senior national side in the years to come.

Going from springboards to a not-so-spring-chicken, there was some hope that English legend James Anderson would get picked as a mentor resource, if not as a full-tilt paceman at the age of 42. Anderson may have been a few years too late because his services were ignored after he set his base price at Rs 1.25 crore.

Kane Williamson and Adil Rashid suffered a similar fate, while the likes of Rovman Powell, Marco Jansen and Faf du Plessis had to find other spaces to reside in.

The same with Will Jacks, but it wasn’t quite as straightforward with the Englishman. After spending a significant amount of time trying to outbid a couple of teams for Jacks, Mumbai knew that Royal Challengers Bengaluru could well have used their Right To Match option and they had the budget for Jacks.

Even as the Mumbai strategists eyed RCB’s table anxiously, the Bengaluru outfit didn’t pull out the RTM stop, prompting owner Akash Ambani to walk over and shake hands with RCB’s management.

Simmering in this bonhomie, 23-year-old Priyansh Arya shot out of obscurity and into the limelight after being picked up by the Punjab Super Kings for Rs 3.8 crore. Arya has only played 11 T20s in his Delhi career, but he only recently struck six sixes in an over so that would have certainly played a part in getting at least four franchises, including RCB, excited about putting up the paddles. 

Despite this excitement, those sitting at tables, with tired paddle-lifting arms, looked about as jaded as you would expect after the last 48 hours. This auction has been all kinds of interesting expectedly, effectively the same as it has always been, but at the end of this one, you get a sense that the generation which was the youth at the time of the IPL's genesis, is now one boot away from the end. 

Sad as that is, this game is for the young, the younger, and now the youngest.  

KARNATAKA PLAYERS

KL Rahul (DC, Rs 14 cr), Devdutt Padikkal (RCB, Rs 2 crore), Karun Nair (DC, Rs 50 lakhs), Prasidh Krishna (GT, Rs 9.5 cr), Abhinav Manohar (SRH, Rs 3.2 cr), Luvnith Sisodia (KKR, Rs 30 lakh), Vyshak Vijaykumar (PBKS, Rs 1.8 cr), Shreyas Gopal (CSK, Rs 30 lakh), Manvanth Kumar (DC, Rs 30 lakh), Pravin Dubey (PBKS, Rs 30 lakh), Mayank Agarwal (unsold).   

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