IPL25
Follow UsThe Indian Premier League (IPL) 2025 mega auction drew mixed reactions from the team owners and support staff after they made their buys on November 24 and 25 at the Abady Al Johar Arena in Jeddah City in Saudi Arabia. Here are all the major quotes from the pre and post auction buys.
Venugopal Rao, Director of Cricket, Delhi Capitals was excited about having a compact bowling and batting lineup after the first round of accelerated auction. "This time, our batting and bowling is very compact. Our bowling lineup is experienced. We have strengthened our fast bowling with Starc, Natarajan, Mohit and Mukesh, who are all experienced. They will combine with our spinners Axar and Kuldeep, so our bowling lineup is very experienced. Batters will win matches for us, but bowlers will win us the title."
Sourav Ganguly, former BCCI President, who is currently the Director of Cricket at the Delhi Capitals (WPL) and JSW Sports, was happy with the team buying Faf du Plessis. "He has been very good in this (T20) format. He had a terrific CPL and MLC. Another part of Faf's ability is the leadership, so we are extremely happy and surprised that we got him for this amount."
Aakash Ambani, co-owner of the Mumbai Indians remained calm without being able to get a lot of players even after fighting hard for them. "In the auction, you have to plan for disappointing losses. We lost some players but our playing 12 is locked in now and we’re very happy about it. Disappointed to lose some ex-MI players. In the last two years, we’ve thought about the balance we need to get back to winning ways. For that we have to handle the emotional aspect too."
Stephen Fleming, Chennai Super Kings head coach explained the logic behind all the signings, especially that of an ageing Ravichandran Ashwin.
Vikram Solanki, GT's director of cricket was happy after they signed Jos Buttler, Kagiso Rabada and Mohammed Siraj after the end of the first two marquee sets.
"We’ve very happy with the team we’ve got. There’s a small number of players in these first two sets and we played our part, according to our plan. The team is starting to take shape but we still need to fill slots and be smart. Actually, a number of very good players will come tomorrow as well,” said the former England international.
Ricky Ponting, Punjab Kings head coach was extremely happy after his team broke the bank for Shreyas Iyer, spending INR 26.75 Cr.
“I haven’t spoken to him (Shreyas Iyer about captaincy) yet, I tried to call him before the auction but he didn’t pick up. He’s been a successful captain in IPL before, I worked with him 3-4 years in Delhi and he was the championship winner last season. I’m delighted to work with him again, if he can do that for us in the IPL I’ll be pretty happy,” he said.
Ponting also talked about the signings of Yuzvendra Chahal and Arshdeep Singh, who were both paid INR 18 Cr. About Arshdeep, the Aussie said, “We had certain targets coming into the auction as every team does. Arshdeep was obviously the first one. He's been in our franchise for a number of years. I was really keen to get him back. Left-arm fast bowler, obviously, with a great skill set with the new ball and the old ball and, you know, one of India's leading wicket-takers in T20 cricket. So he was a perfect fit for us to come back into the Punjab Kings.”
On signing Chahal, Ponting felt, "Yuzi is the highest quality Indian spinner in the auction, so, we wanted to fill certain gaps with the best players we possibly could. And yes, we spent a bit of money to get there, but what we're trying to do is rebuild this franchise basically from the ground up and you can't do that without the best players. So, we felt so far that the auction's gone exactly the way we wanted. We've got a bit of work to do in the back half this afternoon, but that's the fun of it.”
Shashwat Goenka, part of the Lucknow Super Giants (LSG) ownership group, was honest about planning not mattering too much and revealed the reason behind bidding the highest price for Rishabh Pant- INR 27 Cr.
“No matter how much you plan, things don’t always work out like that. This (getting Pant for 27 crore) was very well to our plan. It wasn’t really a magic number, we just wanted a number so that the RTM doesn’t get exercised,” he said.
Parthiv Patel, who joined the Gujarat Titans bandwagon as assistant and batting coach ahead of the mega auction, said, “Very happy to have Jos Buttler in our side. He can bat anywhere, he can keep as well, he can help Shubman also. We wanted to buy our no. 1 bowler and no. 1 batter from the marquee set and we have both.”
Andy Flower, coach of the Royal Challengers Bengaluru (RCB), was happy with the signing of England all-rounder Liam Livingstone. RCB got the destructive batter at INR at 8.75 Cr.
“We are very happy to get Liam Livingstone. He is a very very dangerous player obviously [comes with] huge power but very versatile as well, given that he bowls legspin and offspin. So having that spin addition to our attack is really nice to secure early in the auction,” said Flower.
Hemang Badani, the newly appointed coach of the Delhi Capitals was elated with the signings of KL Rahul and Mitchell Starc.
“Pretty elated with the buys. Both KL and Starc are world-class players. Starc is a match-winner, he's a wicket-taker. KL Rahul again, somebody who we believe is a bankable player, will give you runs each season, has been somebody who's given or scored runs every IPL season. For me, at the moment, this is the best buy of the auction. But having said this, there's work to do," he added.
Venky Mysore, the CEO of the Kolkata knight Riders explained the logic behind going all-out for Venkatesh Iyer, for whom the franchise shelled out INR 23.75 Cr. "The auctions are this way only. At the end of the day, it is about the player you want and the type of player you want. It [the prices] surprises you all the time. When you have salary caps that keep going up, the prices will expand. For us, it was about keeping our core. We kept six players and have brought 2-3 players back from last year. That was the thinking. We definitely didn’t want to find ourselves in a situation where we would not want him back. But on an overall basis, it all." balances out."
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