New Delhi: One of Indian Premier League's (IPL) new babies, Team Kochi, made heads roll on the final day of the auction on Sunday when their Geoff Lawson-led think-tank made some brainless bids, which made their team lineup look like a bowling academy.
Kochi's plans went awfully wrong as their huddle resembled students scurrying for some last-minute preparation outside their examination hall. And it turned from bad to worse with the choice of players they went after.
Though there was some quality in the form of Mahela Jayawardene, VVS Laxman, Brendon McCullum and Muttiah Muralitharan, Lawson looked out of sorts when looked upon for advice by the Kochi management. Their billboard-bearer kept looking for signals from team coach Lawson on whether to raise the bid or not.
Where Kochi, it seems, missed out was lack of advice from expert quarters. They kittied some baffling bids that saw them wasting money for as much as nine bowlers out of the seventeen players they bought.
Out of those nine, there were two left-arm spinners (Ravindra Jadeja and Steve O'Keefe), two off-spinners (Murali and Rames Powar), one leg-spinner (Steven Smith) and four medium-pacers (S Sreesanth, RP Singh, Thissara Perera and R Vinay Kumar). That looks absolutely nonsensical!
Kochi seemed to also forget the Indian players when it came to batting as there was only one specialist Indian batsmen among the six they lapped up and that too not a T20 specialist; namely, VVS Laxman. The others were Mahela Jayawardene, Brendon McCullum, Brad Hodge, Owais Shah and Michael Klinger. It seems they forgot that there can be only four foreigners in the playing XI.
And yes, they also bought the baby-faced wicketkeeper batsman Parthiv Patel and little-known John Hastings to let jaw drops even further.
To sum it up, unless Kochi wake up and make some intelligent buys among the uncapped Indian players in run-up to the start of IPL, they resemble a weighing scale that has gone awfully out of balance.
