Australia's World Cup winners had a field day at the IPL 2024 auction at the Coca-Cola arena in Dubai on Tuesday, December 19 with two of them Mitchell Starc and Pat Cummins cumulatively going for INR 45.25 crore. There was a recency bias but Cummins and Starc have been proven performers and the likes of Sunrisers Hyderabad and Kolkata Knight Riders splurged INR 20.50 crore and INR 24.75 crore respectively. However, that was not the only big overseas purchase for the Sunrisers.
SRH also acquired the services of Travis Head, the player of the match in the World Cup final for a rather reasonable price of INR 6.8 crore. Head was expected to get more bids, however, SRH were lucky to get him at the price that they did.
Australian captain Cummins admitted that it was great to have a fellow Aussie Head in the squad. Both Head and Cummins shared the news of getting picked by SRH on their Instagram stories. David Warner, who was part of the SRH squad for 7 years and led them to the title in 2016 parted ways with the franchise in not the most cordial ways.
He was released by the franchise ahead of the 2022 mega auction and since then has been blocked by the franchise on its social media handles on X (formerly Twitter) and on Instagram as well. Warner wanted to repost the stories by Head and Cummins after being picked by SRH but couldn't and revealed to the world that he had been blocked by its social media handles.
Apart from these two, Sunrisers got a steal deal in Wanindu Hasaranga at a base price of INR 1.5 crore while picking a couple of Indian seam bowling options in Jaydev Unadkat and Akash Singh.
