IPL Auction 2024: RCB Director Of Cricket Says Bangalore Were Forced To Buy Alzarri Joseph

The Royal Challengers Bangalore had to settle down with West Indies bowler Alzarri Joseph who was somehow a desperate buy said the team’s Director of Cricket Mo Bobat after the 2024 IPL Mini Auction came to an end.

RCB were originally very interested in buying the services of the former player of the franchise and 2-time World Cup winner with Australia, Mitchell Starc who went on to become the most expensive player ever in the history of the Indian Premier League.

In short, the South Indian outfit was looking to reunite with Starc who played 2 IPL seasons with the franchise in 2014 and 2015. But since then, the left-arm fast bowler has remained out of the IPL circuit and his comeback is a much awaited one to see.

Starc was 25 when he last played in the IPL and when he steps out to play IPL 2024 he will be 33. But he will not be rocking the Red-black jersey this time around after 2-time champions Kolkata Knight Riders went all in for him in the auction.

KKR were involved in a bidding war with RCB and Gujarat Titans but it was Venky Mysore and Gautam Gambhir who had the last laugh after securing the Australian for 24.75 Crores. However, Starc was not the only one that RCB missed out as Pat Cummins too was in their target before Sunrisers Hyderabad swooped him up for 20 Crores.

Why Did RCB Buy Alzarri Joseph Instead of Starc And Cummins?

Even before both Cummins and Starc came up at the auction, RCB had already bought their 3rd fast bowling target Alzarri Joseph for 11.50 Crores. The Director of Cricket of the Royal Challengers Bangalore Mo Bobat after the auction explained that the Auction order kept them away from landing their main 2 targets.

Alzarri Joseph was up for auction before Mitchell Starc and Pat Cummins. Therefore, RCB did not want to take the risk of losing the West Indies pacer while waiting for Starc to come up and knew that other teams would most definitely get into the tug of war for the Aussie.

“Now, there were obviously two big buys that everyone was after, Cummins and Starc. We wanted to have ourselves in a position to have a good crack at both of them. So the order does dictate what you are capable of doing. We did have a good crack at Cummins but obviously were outbid by SRH and ideally we would have liked to go for Starc but the order made that tricky.”

“From our perspective, Alzarri was another big target. So looking at the finances that were available for all the other teams at that moment, we couldn’t really risk the chance of losing Alzarri and then waiting for Starc and there was a good chance that we may have landed him. But the reality is we would have got outbidden because you can see the number that he got sold for.”

Other than Joseph, RCB bought Yash Dayal for 5 crores, Tom Curran for 1.5 crores, Lockie Ferguson for 2 crores, Swapnil Singh for 20 lakhs, and Saurav Chauhan for 20 lakhs.

RCB Full squad for IPL 2024: Faf du Plessis (c), Glenn Maxwell, Virat Kohli, Rajat Patidar, Anuj Rawat, Dinesh Karthik, Suyash Prabhudessai, Will Jacks, Mahipal Lomror, Karn Sharma, Manoj Bhandage, Mayank Dagar, Vijaykumar Vyshak, Akash Deep, Mohammed Siraj, Reece Topley, Himanshu Sharma, Rajan Kumar, Cameron Green, Alzarri Joseph, Yash Dayal, Tom Curran, Lockie Ferguson, Swapnil Singh, Saurav Chauhan.