It was years back during the auction for 2009 IPL that a clutch of Pakistan’s top cricketers were taken aback when none of the then attracted a bid from the then eight franchises. There was no official directive as players like Shahid Afridi, Shoaib Akhtar, Shoaib Malik and the first edition’s Purple Cap winner Sohail Tanvir were among the registered pool, but the franchise representatives kept conspicuously quiet when their names went under the hammer.
It was a no-brainer that the 26th November terror attack in Mumbai in 2008 had played it’s part and ever since then, no Pakistan passportholders played in IPL – with the odd exception of Azhar Mahmood as he was a British citizen. One could see an encore of it in the first-ever auction of The Hundred in London on 11-12 March as a media report says that the four franchises with Indian investment may refrain from bidding for them.
A BBC report says as many as 67 Pakistan players, four of them women, have enrolled themselves for the auction with no objection certificate from Pakistan Cricket Board (PCB). The likes of white ball captain Salman Ali Agha, Shaheen Shah Afridi, Shadab Khan and Haris Rauf are among more than 950 players to have registered for The Hundred’s draft. The buzz is that the four teams with Indian ownership: Mumbai Indians (MI London), Lucknow Super Giants (Manchester Super Giants), Sunrisers Hyderabad (Sunrisers Leeds) and Delhi Capitals (Southern Brave) will keep them out of bounds after the shadows of geopolitics squeezed the life of the ongoing T20 World Cup.