Chris Gayle has taken the Indian Premier League 2018 by storm with his sensational knocks. In just four innings, he has already registered a century and two fifties as his new franchise Kings XI Punjab began this year’s league on a good note with five wins in seven matches. Extremely pleased with Gayle’s performance, co-owner Ness Wadia on Friday revealed that the team almost lost the destructive opener at the auction, thinking it had run out of cash. Gayle had unexpectedly gone unsold twice before KXIP bought him for his base price of Rs 2 crore.
“We had only Rs 2.1 crore left and if we had bid for Chris earlier (at the auction) and another team came up with a counter bid, we did not have the money to buy him. Luckily, no other team bid for him and we were more than happy to get third time lucky,” Wadia told.
KXIP, who had retained just one player in Axar Patel before the auction, spent big bucks in their bid to build a team for the future. Gayle was their final buy and the Rs 2 crore they spent on him meant they were left with just Rs 10 lakh, using almost their entire purse of Rs 67.5 crore.
Two months later, Gayle has proved all his critics wrong with two half-centuries and a sensational 104 in four innings.
