Vihari, Bharat & Milind go unsold at the IPL-2020 auction

Hyderabad: As many as 332 players went under the hammer for the next season of the Indian Premier League, in Kolkata on Thursday. Local lads from the Telugu states, Hanuma Vihari and KS Bharat & CV Milind went unsold at the auction table.

Vihari, a current Indian middle-order batsman in Tests, was a part of Delhi Capitals in the previous edition of IPL but didn't get many chances to bat. Although the team settled with a combination which didn't include Vihari, releasing him for the next season was very much on the cards.

The Andhra batsman was again open for bidding with a base price of Rs 50 lakh. With his maiden Test hundred against the West Indies in the Caribbean, things looked hopeful for Vihari but went the other way as no team showed interest in him. The batsman made his Test debut in 2018 in England against the English team and shined in his first match with a fifty. Since then, he has been a regular in the Test side but couldn't find a place in the limited over formats.

Vihari has scored 6,100 first-class runs with an average close to 60 and the highest score of 308*.

Lack of adaption from one format to another could be the reason for him being unsold.

Wicket-keeper batsman from Andhra, KS Bharat, has lately been successful to gain the attention of the selectors. He was included as a back-up for Wriddhiman Saha in the recent Test series against Bangladesh after Rishabh Pant was sent to play the Syed Mushtaq Ali Trophy.

Bharat has had a decent outing in the domestic arena with almost 4,000 runs, 3,909 to be precise, to his name with an average of 37.5 and a triple-hundred in a Ranji match in February 2015 – this made him the first wicket-keeper batsman to score a triple ton in Ranji Trophy. He was soon picked up by Delhi Daredevils for his base price of 10 lakh in 2015.

With success knocking Bharat's door of late, he was expected to get picked by a team in the IPL Auction 2020, but things didn't go his way.

The let-arm all-rounder from Hyderabad had first risen into limelight when he picked a hat-trick against TamilNadu in the Vijay Hazare Trophy back in 2013, making him a strong contender for the 2014 U-19 World Cup. He later made the cut & was a part of the World cup squad lead by Vijay Zol in 2014. He was soon picked by the Sunrisers Hyderabad in 2014 and later by the Delhi Daredevils in 2017. He was also a part of RCB in 2019 but did not get a chance to play.

.@Vinay_Kumar_R is going under the hammer and is unsold #IPLAuction

— IndianPremierLeague (@IPL) December 19, 2019

Fortune did not favour Milind this time around as the latter was not picked by any of the teams at the IPL -2020 auction.