The Indian legend Sunil Gavaskar is of the view that the U19 players shouldn’t be paid more than 1 crore INR in the IPL auctions as it takes their focus away from the game. According to Gavaskar, there are many instances of a player bursting onto the scene with immense potential at the junior level and then disappearing within one or two years as they can’t handle fame and money.
Gavaskar, who played plenty of cricket for India and scored more than 10,000 runs in test match cricket, wrote in his column for mid-day that suceeding at the U19 level doesn’t guarantee any success at the senior level. International cricket and IPL are completely different kettle of fish and if you are successful at the U19 level, you need to take your game a couple of notches up to succeed at the senior level too.
Sunil Gavaskar opines that U19 cricketers should prove themselves to fetch huge amounts
In the view of Sunil Gavaskar, if the junior cricketers are not paid a huge sum of money straightaway and the salary cap is kept upto 1 crore INR, it will send them a clear message if they have to earn a huge sum or earn as much as the seniors, they will have to prove themselves at the senior level too and they can’t just fetch the amount because they were successful in junior cricket.
When the first ever IPL auction was held in 2008, the U19 cricketers were not put in the auction and they were actually available to be picked through a draft system. The likes of Virat Kohli and Ravindra Jadeja were picked through draft and they had a fixed salary, it didn’t matter which team signed them.
However, since then, the U19 players have been allowed to get directly into the auction and during this mega auction, the Maharashtra fast bowler Rajvardhan Hangargekar, who was with the U19 Indian team, was bought by CSK for 1.5 crore INR, while the South African U19 batsman Dewald Brevis was bought by Mumbai Indians for over 3 crore INR.
