Legendary Indian cricketer Sunil Gavaskar has critcised Indian Premier League (IPL) teams’ scouts over picking ‘overrated and overvalued’ players who performed in state and city leagues mushrooming across the country. Gavaskar pointed out that the standard of these leagues in nowhere international cricket and often pushed by player agents. He feels that franchises tend to waste their money on such players as they get exposed soon enough and spend rest of the season on the bench.
"A lot of the big hitters in the various State and city leagues that have sprouted up were exposed when faced with the international quality of bowling in the IPL," Gavaskar wrote in Sportstar.
"In the State and city leagues, the standard of both batting and bowling is nowhere near as good, and unless the scouts have a discerning eye and don't get swayed by player agents, the franchises will keep picking players based on these performances and find they have wasted their money."
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Also, he feels that these players perform in an inconsequential match and get retained by the franchise for another season. He did not name the player or the franchise but said that there are four such teams who will retain these players for next season as well.
"When a franchise picks a player for crores and then doesn't play him in more than a couple of games, it tells you that their scouts and advisers have sold them a dummy. The IPL very quickly finds a player out as being overrated and overvalued. Yet there will be players who will have one performance in the tournament, and it's usually in a match of not much consequence for their team, and on the basis of that performance be picked for another year. One could make at least four teams of such one-match performers who will be picked again and again in the IPL," he added.
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Joint-most expensive Chennai Super Kings (CSK) all-rounder Prashant Veer (Rs 14.20 crore) scored just 90 runs from six games while Kartik Sharma (Rs 14.20 crore) showed promising signs. For Lucknow Super Giants (LSG), Mukul Choudhary (Rs 2.60 crore) didn't play a match-winning knock barring the run chase against Kolkata Knight Riders (KKR) early in the season. Meanwhile, Royal Challengers Bengaluru’s (RCB) Mangesh Yadav (Rs 5.20 crore) didn’t get a single game in the well-balanced side.