No One Dumped Ganguly !

The IPL auction is over and to everyone's horror, the former India captain Sourav Ganguly remains unsold. None of the 10 franchisee showed any interest of picking the Bengali southpaw, who brought laurels to the Indian cricket in the past decade. But why should Sourav rely on any other franchisee to buy him when his own regional team KKR was not willing to pick him up. I guess it was their duty to pick Ganguly to save the Bengali pride and also because they represent the city of Kolkata in IPL. And let me quote KKR co-owner Shahrukh, "You can't have a team in Kolkata without dada”. So by not selecting him for this edition, they haven't done any good for themselves. Even with a good team on paper for IPL-4, it is difficult to win hearts of the Bengali people without Sourav.

As a dada fan, it was all-in all a very disheartening auction event for me. I tried to analyse few facts and came up with 5 things which were not in his favour, due to which he was dumped by his own franchisee and even not picked by any of the 9 other franchisees.

1. Sourav has not been playing much cricket since last IPL and his recent performances in the Ranji matches also were not impressive. So most of the franchisee would have thought that it was unwise to bet on an ageing horse when they could have easily gone for the young guns.

2. Moreover, Ganguly increased his base price from $200,000 to $400,000, which can be done if a player wishes so. This went against him and no one was interested in buying him even during the re-auctioning of unsold players , as franchisees  were left with less money to spend , with his own team KKR having just $425,000 at that time.

3. Ganguly has relied on his past performances, and which almost every player does. But it’s different in Ganguly's case. It’s in his destiny that he has to prove himself time and again. With a brilliant comeback in 2007, and being the 5th highest run getter in the world in one dayers, he was surprisingly removed from the team. For the same year, he was the 2nd highest run getter in world in test cricket and had continued this run in 2008 as well. But on the Lankan tour where all Indian batsmen failed miserably, he was the only one to be punished. There were speculations of him being removed from the side just before the Australia series, and due to which he announced his retirement to have a graceful exit. So with such an unexpected track record of being ‘in and out’ of the team after he was sacked as a captain, Sourav shouldn't have relied on his past performance of IPL. Even if he was the best player for KKR in IPL-3 or the 5th highest run getter among all the rest 80 odd players playing in IPL, as always, it was not enough to fetch him a permanent place in the KKR squad.

4. Personally I do not feel that he should have been bought by any team other than KKR, still if we talk about why other team didn't bid for IPL, it can be because of the reason of where he could be fit in the team. Sourav has been always an inspiration for the team and has lead from the front as a captain. For other franchisees it would have been difficult to fit him in a role of a senior player or a motivator in the team. Also the base price factor comes in picture here.

5. Keeping all the sentiment aside, Ganguly should have understood that IPL is all about money now. With cricket for the first time going global at such a huge level and with so many stakeholders associated with it, it’s not just an emotional business for any of the franchisee. People are bothered more about the money they have put in and they want a solid ROI on that. And as KKR has been the only team which hasn’t made it to top-4 in the entire three IPL editions, this was bound to happen. I agree that they didn’t have a formidable side to win an IPL final, sometimes Gayle wasn’t available for most of the season or Mccullum couldn’t handle the burden of captaincy or the local players like Tiwary and Dinda couldn’t perform like other local players were doing for their teams. Even their best bowlers like Shoaib Akhtar and Umar Gul were not allowed to play from 2^nd year onwards and they made a wrong decision of hiring Coach John Buchanan which led to their worst performance in IPL-2.There are n numbers of reasons for their failure, but ultimately everything boils down to Sourav.KKR was Dada’s team, and everyone wanted him to do miracles. He did his best but that wasn’t enough, everyone expects much more from him.

It remains a fact that Ganguly went unsold in IPL-4 auctions and it may be the end of road for Ganguly. But I know I would be wrong in saying so as he has always proved us wrong with his great comebacks. Some way or the other he would definitely bounce back, you have to just wait and watch.