IPL 2024 Auction: Growth of local T20 Leagues, robust scouting network help uncapped players land massive deals

The player auction for the 2024 Indian Premier League (IPL) in Dubai on Tuesday was headlined by two Australian pacers who played important roles in their World Cup success — Mitchell Starc and skipper Pat Cummins. The duo ended up becoming the most expensive players in the league’s history and also the first in the 20-crore club, with Starc getting picked up by Kolkata Knight Riders for Rs 24.75 crore and Cummins joining Sunrisers Hyderabad for Rs 20.5 crore. Read | Indian uncapped players who earned big payday in IPL Auction This year’s auction also witnessed several little known players land massive deals and become household names overnight, with a couple of them even becoming millionaires that even some of the biggest names in the sport often miss out on. The biggest of them all was Uttar Pradesh cricketer Sameer Rizvi, who became one of defending champions Chennai Super Kings’ two major buys of the day at Rs 8.4 crore. There were also the likes of Jharkhand’s Kumar Kushagra, who went to the Delhi Capitals for a whopping Rs 7.2 crore. Vidarbha’s Shubman Dubey fetched a bid of Rs 5.8 crore from the Rajasthan Royals. Read | Who is Sameer Rizvi, the UP batter who earned Rs 8.4 crore from CSK? Kushagra isn’t the only uncapped cricketer from Jharkhand who struck gold in the auction. Robin Minz, like Kushagra and pretty much everybody else mentioned above, was a player who wasn’t really known outside of a handful of cricketers and coaches, primarily those belonging to his state. On Tuesday, he became the first tribal cricketer in the history of the Indian Premier League when he went to  Gujarat Titans for Rs 3.6 crore. He will be joined in the squad by statement Sushant Mishra, who got picked up by the Shubman Gill-led side for Rs 2.2 crore. Similarly, Tamil Nadu’s M Siddharth, who had been part of the Delhi Capitals and Kolkata Knight Riders squads in the past but has yet to play an IPL match, went to Lucknow Super Giants for Rs 2.4 crore. Read | Shubham Dubey, son of a paan stall owner, snapped up by RR for Rs 5.8Cr And we are not even including Tamil Nadu’s M Shahrukh Khan and Uttar Pradesh’s Yash Dubey, who found new homes in the IPL in Gujarat Titans and Royal Challengers Bangalore respectively. The two have performed in the IPL before, with Shahrukh having developed his skills as a middle-order bat and a finisher at Punjab Kings last season and richly deserved a big contract. There were a number of takeaways from the auction, the most prominent of which was the fact that the league is bigger than ever now with the 20-crore mark finally getting breached after a decade-and-a-half of the league’s existence. The massive windfall for uncapped players, on the other hand, once again shows that Indian cricket is in good hands with the IPL scouts who keep a close eye on the events of the various T20 leagues that have sprung up all over the country as well as on domestic events such as the Syed Mushtaq Ali Trophy. Equally deserving of credit is the robust network of scouts who are deployed across the length and the breadth of the country, keeping a keen eye on the events of not only BCCI’s premier domestic white-ball events but also on the T20 leagues that initially started in states such as Tamil Nadu, Karnataka and Mumbai and have now spread all over the country, with states such as Uttar Pradesh and Rajasthan also joining the bandwagon. Rizvi, the most expensive of the uncapped players of the tag, is perhaps the best example in this regard. While he has had solid numbers in Mushtaq Ali and other BCCI events, it’s his solid contributions in the inaugural UPT20 that might have ultimately sealed his place in the CSK squad. The 20-year-old smashed 455 runs in nine outings for the Kanpur Superstars, scoring two hundreds along the way. “One of the IPL scouts actually told me that he was the right-handed Suresh Raina. The areas that he hits against spin are similar and many teams might go after him,” Abhinav Mukund told Jio Cinema, describing the batter who has been described by many as Ambati Rayudu’s replacement in the ‘Yellow Army’. Similarly, left-arm spinner Siddharth has been a consistent performer for Tamil Nadu but it his his numbers in the 2023 edition of the Tamil Nadu Premier League (TNPL) — where he collected 11 wickets in nine games at an outstanding economy of 5.61 that must have made him something of a hot property for franchises heading into the auction. The extensive scouting has consistently led to the unearthing of gems over the years, and the rise of Jasprit Bumrah and Hardik Pandya through the ranks after being spotted by MI scouts is perhaps the most well-known example in this regard. And the demand for uncapped players in Tuesday’s auction further reinforces the notion that IPL is perhaps the best thing to have happened to Indian cricket at a grassroots level.