From what seemed like a below par weekend, Mumbai Indians zoomed up the charts of those teams who had the best auction with their recruitment of the likes of Jofra Archer, Tim David and Tymal Mills.

During the second day of the Indian Premier League 2022 mega auction, Mumbai Indians owner Akash Ambani broke down the thinking behind Mumbai Indians’ auction strategy and the reason behind investing in the players they eventually bought.

When Mumbai Indians were relatively nonchalant and relaxed on day one of the mega-auction as the paddles went up across the room, a few eyebrows were raised. They broke the bank for Ishan Kishan and retained him for a massive Rs 15.25 crore, making him the most expensive buy of the auction.

However, apart from that, there still remained an uncertainty around which players they were planning to go after after that. On day two, the four-time champions cleared the air as they invested in Jofra Archer (8 Crore) and Tim David (8.25 Crore).

In an interaction wit Star Sports during the auction, Ambani went into great detail behind their top buys and said, “If someone had told us that we would walk out of the auction with Ishan Kishan and Jofra Archer, I wouldn’t have believed it.”

Here is a look at the thought-process behind some of the buys for Mumbai Indians:

On Ishan Kishan:

When we were sitting for our retention discussions, the third choice was so hard and between Ishan Hardik [Pandya] and Surya [Suryakumar Yadav], you really have sleepless nights to go for which one. But we were very, very committed to getting one of them back. Of course Hardik is captaining Ahmedabad and we wish him all the best but very, very happy to have Ishan back.

On Jofra Archer:

Jofra Archer has been a player that Mahela gave his first professional debut to [Khulna Titans in BPL, although Archer had played for Sussex across formats before] and since then, we have been thinking about them (Jasprit Bumrah and Jofra Archer) as a pair and we’re so happy that we got them together although it’s going to be next year; but we’re very happy to have Jof and Boom make a lethal pair for our bowling attack.

On Tymal Mills:

We thought that he would go for a lot more. Tymal has been an experienced death bowler. Mahela coaches him in The Hundred. He’s stayed injury-free which is very, very important for us. He’s one of the main picks we had for this season so that we remain competitive and challenge for the cup even this season.

On Tim David:

He’s going to partner with (Kieron) Pollard at No. 6. We’ve always betted on our power hitters in the bottom of the order for success at Mumbai Indians and Tim was one of the players that we have been tracking. Fortunately, he got a good spell at RCB last year so he had the experience of IPL to know what it was all about although he did not play too much but we’re very very happy to have him and we look forward to him and Pollard finishing the innings for us.

On combination of youth and experience:

Yeah, we wanted to make sure we have that. The experience came with our retention picks. Less tensed than I was at the end of yesterday, very happy today. If someone had told us that we would walk out of the auction with Ishan Kishan and Jofra Archer, I wouldn’t have believed it. Getting Ishan back, lot of people told us it is never going to happen.

Message to the fans

Hope you are excited by our picks, we tried our best. I understand that day one must have been a little bit frustrating, but you now know who we were saving for.