- England T20 specialist Tymal Mills hails his ‘life-changing’ deal
- Stokes lands £1.7m after being signed by Rising Pune Supergiants
Ben Stokes described the moment he became the highest paid England cricketer of all time as “complete carnage”, having learned of his £1.7m deal to play for Rising Pune Supergiants in the Indian Premier League during the early hours of yesterday morning via social media.
But even the all-rounder’s surprise could not match that of the Sussex left-arm fast bowler, Tymal Mills, who from a reserve price of £60,000 finished up with a £1.4m deal to play for Royal Challengers Bangalore, some two years after he nearly quit the game.
With Eoin Morgan, Chris Woakes, Jason Roy and Chris Jordan also picking up contracts, it felt like a watershed moment for English cricketers in the auction and reflected the growing acceptance of the world’s most lucrative Twenty20 league by the England and Wales Cricket Board.
Stokes, 25, had gone into the auction widely tipped to be signed up and found himself the subject of a bidding war between five of the eight franchises. Pune, last year’s bottom-ranked side, secured his services for 14.5 crore rupees (£1.7m) ahead of Sunrisers Hyderabad for seven times his starting price.
The Durham all-rounder thus became the highest paid overseas player in the IPL and the second biggest IPL auction sale after the £1.9m deal for India’s Yuvraj Singh two years ago. Given the deal is roughly twice that of his combined international central contracts, Stokes will earn more than any England cricketer before him.
“It’s a life changing amount of money,” said Stokes, who waited 40 minutes to go under the auctioneer’s hammer after setting his alarm for 3.30am. “I was following on Twitter, I didn’t actually see the auction live. I kept on refreshing. I saw people were tweeting and then I realised that Pune had got me. I wasn’t sure how much a crore was. It was complete carnage.”
The seven-figure sum collected by Mills was arguably the more staggering, however, not least because he has won only four caps and came close to retiring in 2014 owing to the congenital back condition that has since forced him become a specialist Twenty20 player.
Speaking from the United Arab Emirates, where he is playing in the Pakistan Super League, the 24-year-old said: “I was the lowest of the base prices because I just wanted to get picked up by a team. When my name came up I was nervous, giddy and jumpy. The bidding was quite slow but once it hit 10 crore I knew it was big money – but it kept going.
“When it finished I did not know how much it was worth. When I worked it out I could not believe it, it did not seem real. It’s an amount of money that can change your life. It will for me.”
Kevin Pietersen and Andrew Flintoff, who secured £1.2m IPL deals in 2009, are the only English cricketers to have previously drawn such eye-watering numbers.
The 2017 IPL's top-paid cricketers
It means there will be eight England internationals in this year’s IPL – Jos Buttler and Sam Billings already have deals from last year at Mumbai Indians and Delhi Daredevils respectively – although only Mills may be available to play for the entire tournament, which runs from 5 April through to the final in Hyderabad on 21 May.
With the Champions Trophy being held in England this summer, Morgan, as one-day captain, will likely be asked to return after four weeks in time for the one-day series with Ireland that starts on 5 May. The remaining six are expected to have until 14 May but will still miss the final week as they are expected to attend a training camp in Spain.
IPL salaries are listed for the full duration of the seven-week league and they will therefore receive a pro-rata amount based on the number of games they can play. There are obliged payments back to the English county system too and in the case of Stokes this will see him docked 0.5% of his central contract for every day he is away, or around £140,000 overall.
Away from the English recruitment, perhaps the biggest breakthrough came with deals for Mohammad Nabi and Rashid Khan, who became the first from Afghanistan to sign for IPL teams. Both will play for Hyderabad, with Rashid, an 18-year-old leg-spinner, earning £480,000 and with Nabi, an off-spinning all-rounder, £36,000.
Other big overseas earners in the auction were the South Africa fast bowler Kagiso Rabada (£600,000, Delhi), the New Zealand left-armer Trent Boult (£600,000, Kolkata) and Australia’s right-arm quick Pat Cummins (£550,000, Delhi).
With 2017 the final IPL season before every player is put back into the auction next year, only 66 “lots” were sold this time. Karn Sharma, a leg-spinner, secured the highest price for an Indian cricketer with a £380,000 contract at Mumbai. Cheteshwar Pujara and Ishant Sharma, who featured in the 4-0 Test series victory over England in December, went unsold.
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