Mumbai Indians - Mega Auction Day 2 Review
Front row tickets for Bumrah-Archer please?
Ending on the higher end of the remaining balance ending into Day 2, Mumbai evidently backloaded for Day 2, with only four buys in Ishan Kishan, Dewald Brevis, Basil Thampi and Murugan Ashwin, and had a big day on their hands, with10-17 slots remaining to fill, including 6 overseas slots.
Mumbai’s Day Under The Hammer
Mumbai’s first item on the Day 2 list was stocking up on pacers, both overseas and local, evident in their losing bids of Marco Jansen for 4 crores, Khaleel Ahmed for 5 crores and Navdeep Saini for 2.40 crores respectively. They ended up procuring a successful bid of Jaydev Unadkat for 1.30 crores, fighting with the Chennai Super Kings on this instance.
Mumbai then switched their focus on spinners, starting by buying the player following Unadkat, buying Mayank Markande for 65 lakh, engaging in a brief bidding war with the Rajasthan Royals, and Lucknow Supergiants.
Following a brief period of dormancy, Mumbai put up their paddle again for Sanjay Yadav for 50 lakh, engaging in a brief bidding war with the Punjab Kings.
After buying N Tilak Varma for 1.70 crores, Mumbai’s focus was once again on pacers, buying Daniel Sams for 2.60 crores, 1.50 crores for Tymal Mills, the jack of all trades Jofra Archer for 8 crores, and Riley Meredith for his base price of 1 crore. Using half their overseas slots on pacers is likely because of how pace friendly the Wankhede wicket is, something In The Air predicted.
Following the buy of Sams, Mumbai also had a crack at recent U19 World Cup winner Rajvardhan Hangargekar, a fast bowling all-rounder capable of bowling 140+, but ended up having the losing bid to the Chennai Super Kings. They also went for Romario Shepherd briefly soon after, going up to 3.60 crores.
Before procuring Meredith, Mumbai briefly went after Alzarri Joseph, who broke the 11 year old record of Sohail Tanvir of the best IPL bowling figures under their jersey in 2009, going up to 85 lakh from his base price of 75 lakh.
After Meredith, their focus switched back to batting options, starting with the buy of Tim David for 8.25 crores.
Mumbai eventually finished their auction with only 10 lakh remaining in their wallet, with both all squad and overseas slots filled, exhausting 99.79% of their initial 48 crore wallet.
The Hottest Buy - Tim David
Mumbai’s most expensive buy of Day 2 was Tim David for 8.25 crores, an excellent option to pair Kieron Pollard with seeing as they no longer have the services of Hardik Pandya. Tim David’s current T20 career strike rate against pace is 172.25, and is also a positive matchup against fingerspin.
Standing quite tall at 6 feet and 5 inches, David also has long levers, which help further his reach and also gives him plenty of power.
Expect David to come in at 5/6 regularly during the season with Pollard at the other side of the crease. Essentially, it will be the same as what we have seen with the Pollard-Hardik duo towards the last 3-5 overs of an innings, but with David in place of Hardik.
Squad Analysis
Given how pace friendly the Wankhede wicket is as already mentioned, it can be understood why half of the overseas slots are filled by pacers (Archer, Mills, Meredith and Sams). However, I feel the dynamics of the 10 team IPL and their cost cutting has cut them thin in terms of both the local pace and spin departments.
They have bought Thampi and Unadkat, both who were likely quite down in their list of pacers they wanted to target. Taking into account their current IPL records, it is essentially Mumbai having to pick from the lesser poisons of the two, unless they have obviously substantially improved during the off-season of the IPL.
Recruiting Archer to bowl in tandem along with Bumrah is genuinely front row seat worthy, though unfortunately we will have to wait for that until the next season. I personally believe that had Archer been able to play this season as well, he would have easily broken the 10 crore barrier, though it seems some teams are more focused on short term success.
As a result of his unavailability this season and their other bowling recruitments, Mumbai in my opinion will be heavily reliant on their batting.
For now though, Mumbai will have to hope the duo of Bumrah-Mills will be more than enough, given the local pace stock available to them.
The Krunal Pandya replacement is evidently Sanjay Yadav, a 26 year old SLA allrounder who plays for Tamil Nadu domestically. He also offers high intent with the bat.
With Hardik leaving Mumbai for Ahmedabad, I was of the opinion that they would go for one of Odean Smith or Shepherd, seeing the scarcity of like-for-like local replacements available. They ended up securing Tim David, who is just as good of an option if not definitely a bit more reliable to pair Pollard up with. As I already said before, expect the same as Pollard-Hardik with this upcoming duo.
With Dewald Brevis listed in the first page of the Player List spreadsheet, I was (along with a lot of people most definitely) anticipated a bidding war to alight for Baby AB. And two other teams expressed interest in him: the Punjab Kings and the Chennai Super Kings, helping to raise his base price of 20 lakh to 4 crores.
Even with the massive upside value he displayed in the recently concluded U19 World Cup, I still believe 4 crores is a bit too much for someone who is very raw and has only played 5 T20s (he is currently playing in the ongoing CSA T20 Challenge for the Titans), especially when you consider that the likes for Jason Roy were cheaper/bought for base price.
Probable XI and Potential Weaknesses
Check out my thread here.
Season Prediction
In spite of their local pace and spin stock not being the most adept, I firmly believe their batting should be more than enough to take them to the top 4 comfortably. Had the services of Archer been available this year, I would automatically pen them to be one of the finalists.