By IANS
Sydney : Australian all rounder Andrew Symonds was left amazed by the price he fetched in the Indian Premier League (IPL) player auction, the media here reported Thursday.
Symonds went for $1.35 million to Hyderabad in the over-10-hour auction in Mumbai Wednesday, which was well above the price paid for any other Australian player. He is second only to India’s one-day captain Mahendra Singh Dhoni ($1.5 million).
By contrast, Australian captain Ricky Ponting went for $400,000. Brett Lee was the second most expensive Australian at $900,000 and Symonds said he could not work out why his price was so much higher than other Australian players.
“If I could tell you why that would probably be quite a good news story, but there is no sort of logical sense to what each player’s worth … I can’t see a pattern,” Symonds was quoted as saying in The Daily Telegraph.
Symonds said he found the entire auction process astonishing and was surprised by the values of many of the players. He said he was particularly surprised at the difference between his price and that of skipper Ricky Ponting.
“That’s quite amazing how that’s unfolded. Unfortunately it’s got nothing to do with me but that just the way things turned out,” he said.
Asked if he felt like a cricket mercenary, he said: “That’s what they offered to pay for me, I didn’t ask for it.”