Unsold mysteries of IPL

As the auction happened, Maxwell was playing another ODI against the West Indies, in which he was bowled for a first-ball duck. He took four wickets with his off breaks, but Sunil Narine smashed him for four successive sixes. Imagine if the dates of the two matches had been exchanged, and played in a different time zone. Would anyone have wanted to punt a million dollars on him?

A bid for someone like Maxwell, who is promising but hasn’t played enough international cricket to have built up a meaningful collection of statistics, is largely founded on faith, hearsay and first impressions. Doubly so in the case of Kane Richardson (Pune, $700,000), Chris Morris (Chennai, $ 625,000) or Sachithra Senanayake (Kolkata, $625,000), who between them have played eight ODIs and three T20Is.

The sums spent on these players seem even more exorbitant when you consider that Vernon Philander (like Morris, a South African seam-bowling all-rounder) and Rangana Herath (like Senanayake, a Sri Lankan spinner) are like-for-like alternatives with immense pedigree and no international commitments during the IPL period, and were both available at a base price of $100,000. Maybe the franchises have far-reaching scouting networks that know something the selectors don’t, which lets them ignore bowlers ranked number two and four on

... contd.