This England great makes himself unavailable for IPL auction, the price to sign Starc or Natrajan is just…

The Board of Control for Cricket in India (BCCI) declared the dates of IPL 2025 mega auction on its official social media handles on Tuesday. The IPL 2025 Player Auction has seen the registration of 1574 players (1165 Indian players and 409 players from other countries), which is scheduled to take place on two consecutive days, November 24 and 25 in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia. This comprises 320 capped, 1224 uncapped and 30 associate players from A list countries. As per ESPN Cricinfo, cricketer Ben Stokes is not on the registered players list in the long list.

The preliminary list shall be shortened after the discussion with the franchises and all other concerned parties. It also said released skippers of Delhi Capitals, Lucknow Super Giants and Kolkata Knight Riders, Rishabh Pant, KL Rahul and Shreyas Iyer respectively, are tagged with a price of rupees two crore. The same minimum price applies for Ravichandran Ashwin and Yuzvendra Chahal, the two spinners who have not been retained by Rajasthan Royals.

Among the recently added Indian players with the highest base price amounting to Rs 2 crore are James Anderson, Khaleel Ahmed, Deepak Chahar, Venkatesh Iyer, Avesh Khan, Ishaan Kishan, Mukesh Kumar, Bhuvaneshwar Kumar, Prasidh Krishna, T Natarajan, Devdutt Padikkal, Krunal Pandya, Harshal Patel, Arshdeep Singh, Washington Sundar, Shardul Thakur and Mohammed Siraj and Umesh Yadav.

Prithvi Shaw and Sarfaraz Khan are having a base price of Rs 75 lakh

Former Rajasthan Royals captain Ben Stokes’ name does not appear on the long list of 1574 players. Mitchell Starc, who was purchased by Kolkata Knight Riders for Rs 24.50 crores in 2024, has a base price of Rs 2 crores.

In the middle of this, England’s pace stalwart James Anderson, who has made his exit from international cricket and has not even seasoned IPL, has signed for a paltry sum of Rs 1.25 crore.

At the same time, there is outlandish inclusion of a player from Italy named Thomas Draca who was recently acquired by MI Emirates for the ILT20 in UAE