Big Money Sides in the IPL: A Failed Endeavour

IPL 10 was a showcase of young players such as Rishabh Pant, Sanju Samson and Nitish Rana. The young Pandya brothers are the main reason behind the win of IPL when they won some matches by themselves in the early stages of IPL. While Hardik Pandya has a spot in the national team, his young brother Krunal Pandya still trying his best to earn the spot. While these youngsters won the matches for their team some of the players who were bought for a hefty amount of fees couldn’t perform well. RCB and GL are two IPL teams who bought many big stars but still could not qualify for playoffs. Let’s analyze these two money sides and see what went wrong with these two teams.

Royal Challengers Bangalore

RCB is the strongest team on the paper with the names like Virat Kohli, Chris Gayle, Ab de Villiers and Shane Watson but still, they finished their season at the bottom of the table. Here is the list of their expensive players and stats of the season.

Virat Kohli

Virat Kohli will get INR 15 Cr for this IPL season. He played 10 matches in this season and scored 308 runs with an average of 30.8. While this average is good according to the T20 standards but when you are one of the best batsmen in the world you need to perform better than this.

Chris Gayle

Chris Gayle will get INR 8.4 Cr for this IPL season. He played 9 matches in this season and scored 200 runs with an average of 22.22. There was a time when Chris Gayle would hit 22 runs in a single over but we haven’s seen his same performance from past three seasons. Every season there is the same story, they play Gayle as an opener in the hope that one day Gayle storm will come but he keeps failing.

AB de Villiers

Ab de Villiers will get INR 9.5 Cr for this IPL season. He played 9 matches in this season and scored 216 runs with an average of 27. Known as Mr. 360 could not live up to his standards and failed miserably in this season.

Shane Watson

Shane Watson will get INR 9.5 Cr for this IPL season. He played 8 matches in this season and scored 71 runs with an average of 11.83 and took only 5 wickets. There was nothing to admire in his bowling as he had an expensive economy rate of 9.

Tymal Mills

Tymal Mills will get INR 12 Cr for this IPL season. He played 5 matches in this season and took only 5 wickets with an economy rate of 8.57.

Even with these top players RCB had, they won only three matches and sat at the bottom of the table despite having a strong team.

Gujarat Lions

Gujarat will feel relieved that their contract is expiring and they won’t play the next season because the season they had, they will not have any expectations from them even if they play in the next season. Here is the list of their expensive players and stats of the season.

Suresh Raina

Suresh Raina will get INR 12.5 Cr for this IPL season. He played 14 matches in this season and scored 442 runs with an average of 40.18. Suresh Raina is one of best T20 batsman in the world as the price tag says it all. He had a good season as he managed to cross 400 runs mark in this season.

Ravindra Jadeja

Ravindra Jadeja will get INR 9.5 Cr for this IPL season. He played 12 matches in this season and scored 158 runs with an average of 39.50 and he also took 5 wickets. One can say that being a bowling all-rounder he couldn’t perform with his primary task as he managed to take only 5 wickets but all is well if an all-rounder has an average of 39.

James Faulkner

James Faulkner will get INR 7.5 Cr for this IPL season. What is the use of a bowler if he has an economy of 9.79? Well, there is no use of such bowler and James Faulkner was completely off the track this season with this kind of performance. He only took 5 wickets playing 8 matches.

Brendon McCullum

Ravindra Jadeja will get INR 5.5 Cr for this IPL season. He played 12 matches in this season and scored 320 runs with an average of 29.09. Brendon McCullum is known for his explosive batting but in this season he couldn’t explode. He was unable to get a good start and as result, he got out early in most of the matches.

Apart from these players they had Dwayne Smith, Dinesh Karthik and Dhawan Kulkarni who all were purchased for a sum larger than INR 2 Cr but they all couldn’t perform well this season. With the failure of these star players, Gujarat had a bad season and managed to win only four matches out of fourteen they played.

Conclusion

The failure of big-money players should be the main concern of team owners next season. Gujarat and Banglore spend loads of money to buy big players but they couldn’t perform and as the result, they were the bottom two of the season. On the other hand, for Banglore Pawan Negi (bought for 1 Cr) was the top player and for Gujarat Tye (bought for 50 lakh) was the top player. This shows us that if you buy talented players instead of big names, that can do more good for your team. Now when in 2018, everything will be open again for auction, all the team owners should be careful that they don’t spend millions of money on the star players and they should try to buy some talented players instead.