Indian wicketkeeper-batter Rishabh Pant became the most expensive player in IPL history after getting bought by the Lucknow Super Giants (LSG) for a whopping fee of INR 27 crore. A massive bidding war took place between LSG and Sunrisers Hyderabad to acquire the player’s services.
After initially getting bought by LSG for INR 20.75 crore, Delhi Capitals (DC) would use their RTM card for Pant which mean that LSG had to come up with a final bid if they wanted the player. The Lucknow-based franchise’s final bid ended up being INR 27 crore which proved to be too much for DC, who backed out and let LSG buy the player for the massive fee.
While speaking about the buy, Goenka said that the franchise bought Pant in the budget it had kept for the wicketkeeper-batter. He added that no ego was involved in LSG going so far to win the bidding war.
“No no, not at all. Nothing like that at all. This is not about vanity at all. Ego nahi hai [There’s no ego here]. I did not have that in mind at all. We had structured the auction in a certain way and Pant was an integral part of our plans. We had done some budgeting for him,” Goenka told Cricbuzz.
“Look we could not get Bhuvneshwar Kumar and we went for Akash Deep. We wanted two Indian fast bowlers and we spent INR 9.75 crore on Avesh (Khan) and INR 8 crore on Akash Deep. This was not about one individual player. It was not about egos. Did we want to have the most expensive player? No. At the end of the day this does not mean very much to the franchise. Eventually it is about performance and how the team balance looks,” Goenka added.
LSG purchased a total of 19 players in the auction after having already retained the likes of Nicholas Pooran, Ravi Bishnoi, Mayank Yadav, Ayush Badoni and Mohsin Khan.
LSG squad for IPL 2025: Nicholas Pooran, Ravi Bishnoi, Mayank Yadav, Mohsin Khan, Ayush Badoni, Rishabh Pant, David Miller, Aiden Markram, Mitchell Marsh, Avesh Khan, Abdul Samad, Aryan Juyal, Akash Deep, Himmat Singh, M. Siddharth, Digvesh Singh, Shahbaz Ahmed, Akash Singh, Shamar Joseph, Prince Yadav, Yuvraj Chaudhary, Rajvardhan Hangargekar, Arshin Kulkarni, Matthew Breetzke
The post “This is not about…”: LSG owner Sanjiv Goenka clarifies 27 crore bid for Rishabh Pant appeared first on Cricket Country.
