Both the new teams in the IPL, Pune and Rajkot have been given the first pick to choose the players from the suspended teams before they are all released for auction rounds early next year. In all the hustle and bustle, both the teams were given the option to choose up to 5 players for their teams. So the players chosen by the teams are as follows:
Pune: MS Dhoni, Ajinkya Rahane, Ravichandran Ashwin, Steven Smith, Faf du Plessis
Rajkot: Suresh Raina, Ravindra Jadeja, Brendon McCullum, James Faulkner, Dwayne Bravo
Interestingly as we can see in the list above, both the teams have primarily chosen players who either have high brand value or are genuine batsmen or all-rounders. R Ashwin is the only specialist bowler among all the picks. While Pune chose MS Dhoni in their ranks and also the possible captain of the team, the Rajkot team decided to go first with Suresh Raina before all other players which show that even with the foreign players in the fray the teams decided to go for the Indian players first.
The Pune team is owned by New Rising while the Rajkot team is owned by Intex. The draft was held in Mumbai yesterday and all the other players who have not been chosen for the draft will be released for the fresh round of auctions. In the entire draft selections, both the teams have lost INR 39 crores of available auction money to spend as they had to pay that in players fees selected in the draft. So both the teams will now enter the auction rounds with INR 27 crores in hand to pick their rest of the team. The auction round is going to be held in Bangalore in February.
The player draft was an important necessity as some of the players from both the teams were going to be retained in the next edition of the IPL and it has been unfair to them in all this. Hence the IPL draft is a good way to go about it to make it a fair playing ground for both the teams as well as the players. Both the new teams are in place of the suspended two teams from the IPL, Chennai Super Kings and Rajasthan Royals as their owners were found guilty in spot fixing. The teams will appear in the 2016 and 2017 editions of the IPL and once the ban on both the previous teams is lifted off, then the decision will be taken by the BCCI as to how the future IPL editions will be held and with how many teams.
In the entire draft, there were less surprises, but still the exclusion of Shane Watson is still a bit of a surprise since he is one of the top all-rounders in the game today. Also in the entire draft, no genuine fast bowlers were chose among both the teams. There were as many as 50 players in the draft among whom 10 were chosen. For both the teams they had to pay the players in the order of which they were chosen accordingly as follows:
First Player: INR 12.5 crores
Second Player: INR 9.5 crores
Third Player: INR 7.5 crores
Fourth Player: INR 5.5 crores
Fifth Player: INR 4 crores.
These figures are not the actual salary of the players and they can be entitled to more by the team, but this is the base value for them. Now it will be left to be seen as to how the teams use the rest of the money in their kitty to choose the rest of their team for the IPL and how it all pans out for them being new teams.
rounak