Punjab Kings broke the bank for IPL-winning captain Shreyas Iyer after signing the star batter at a whopping price of Rs 26.75 crore at the IPL 2025 mega auction. PBKS came into the auction arena in Jeddah with the biggest purse among all teams with Rs 110.5 crore in their bag as they had retained only Shashank Singh and Prabhsimran Singh.
Iyer was among the initial ones onto the auction table and unsurprisingly, teams went big for him before PBKS successfully picked him for a huge sum of Rs 26.75 crore. PBKS head coach Ricky Ponting, who has previously worked with Shreyas at Delhi Capitals, has opened up on the signing.
"I wanted to work with Shreyas. I've worked with him before and he is a great guy and a great player. He'll be a great leader for our team if we decide to go that way, which I'm pretty sure we probably will. And obviously, he was the championship-winning captain last year. So there are lots of great things about bringing him to Punjab," Ponting told Star Sports.
Apart from Shreyas, PBKS made some more high-profile signings in Yuzvendra Chahal and bringing back Arshdeep Singh through Right to Match. "They splashed 18 crore for both the players. Ponting opened up rationale behind picking them for hefty amounts. Yuzi is the highest-quality Indian spinner in the auction, so, we wanted to fill certain gaps with the best players we possibly could. And yes, we spent a bit of money to get there, but what we're trying to do is rebuild this franchise basically from the ground up and you can't do that without the best players.
"So, we felt so far that the auction's gone exactly the way we wanted. We've got a bit of work to do in the back half this afternoon, but that's the fun of it," he added.
"We had certain targets coming into the auction as every team does. Arshdeep was obviously the first one," Ponting said. "He's been in our franchise for a number of years. I was really keen to get him back. Left-arm fast bowler, obviously, with a great skill set with the new ball and the old ball and, you know, one of India's leading wicket-takers in T20 cricket. So he was a perfect fit for us," Ponting said.
