KL Rahul
A mega auction for players will be held before the new season of the Indian Premier League (IPL 2025). Franchises have officially announced the details of the players retained in their teams and several star players have been unexpectedly released. Discussions are ongoing in cricket circles that a bidding war is going to take place in the auction for some such players. Among them is Indian star wicket-keeper batsman KL Rahul.
Virat Kohli, KL Rahul
Excitement is already building in the cricket circle regarding the IPL 2025 mega auction. Many Indian star players including Rishabh Pant, KL Rahul, and Shreyas Iyer are expected to be in the mega auction. It is reported that franchises have already started discussions with the respective players. Former Indian star player Sunil Gavaskar predicted that Indian wicketkeeper-batsman KL Rahul will be a hot cake in the upcoming mega auction and several teams will fight for him. He said that KL Rahul will be on the radar of 3 teams. It is known that Rahul bid farewell to Lucknow Super Giants after IPL franchise owner Sanjeev Goenka publicly scolded him in IPL 2024.
All teams released their retention lists on October 31. The Lucknow team retained five players- Nicholas Pooran, Ravi Bishnoi, Mayank Yadav, Mohsin Khan, and Ayush Badoni. With this, KL Rahul entered the auction. According to Sunil Gavaskar, 3 teams - RCB, CSK, and SRH - will try to acquire services of KL Rahul.
Speaking on Star Sports, Sunil Gavaskar said, "I do believe that the two south franchises, Bengaluru as well as Chennai, will go for KL Rahul. Maybe even Hyderabad will go, but Bangalore is of course KL Rahul's hometown. So clearly I think he will be enthused, he will be encouraged, he will want to play in front of his home crowd. So Bengaluru might go for KL Rahul."
KL Rahul has been out of form recently. Although he is scoring heavily in IPL, his batting strike rate is not great. Currently, all eyes are on Rahul in the Test series against Australia. But before that, he proved to be a complete flop against Bangladesh and New Zealand. Not only this, Rahul got the opportunity to open for India A, but even here runs did not come from his bat. It is now interesting to see which team will place a heavy bet on Rahul in the mega auction to be held on November 24 and 25.