IPL Auction: Jaggi, Shaw could be big draws

BENGALURU: Talent scouts for IPL franchises have had a busy season, travelling across the country to various tournaments - the Tamil Nadu Premier League, Karnataka Premier League, the T20 inter-zonals and the Syed Mushtaq Ali T20 that concluded in Mumbai on Saturday. When the team think tanks look to finalize the IPL-10 squad, the Indian domestic players will come into focus.
With limited budgets, most of the players have gone with a minimum base price of Rs 10 lakh, which is sure to work to the advantage of both the players and the franchises.
Last year, the highest bid for an Indian player was a whopping Rs 8.5 crore paid by Delhi Daredevils for allrounder Pawan Negi. Among the un capped players, Tamil Nadu's M Ashwin was snapped up for Rs 4.5 crore (base price Rs 10 lakh), while Mumbai Indians went with Karnataka's Kishore Ka math for Rs 1.4 crore. Negi, after a forgettable 2016, is back in the auction pool at a base price of Rs 30 lakh.
With a chunk of the South African and English players leaving early this year, there will be a greater emphasis on picking the right emerging talent to fill the voids.
A pointer towards this was the inclusion of Ishank Jaggi, for whom the delay in the auction came as a blessing in disguise. The 28-yearold Jharkhand batsman, who was earlier left out of the trimmed list of 351 players, was added on Saturday. The addition of six more players took the auction pool to 358 on Sunday evening.
Among those who are expected to generate a lot of interest are Prithvi Shaw (Mumbai), K Gowtham (Karnataka), Ishank Jaggi (Jharkhand), Pavan Deshpande (Karnataka), Tanmay Agarwal (Hyderabad), Ankit Bhawane (Maharashtra), Mohammed Siraj (Hyderabad), Basil Thampi (Kerala), Vishnu Vinod (Kerala), M Aswin and T Natarajan (both from Tamil Nadu).