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Abrar Ahmed has become the first Pakistani player to be signed by one of the four Indian-owned Hundred teams after he was bought by Sunrisers Leeds for £190,000 in the inaugural men’s player auction.
The signing was a badly needed relief for the England and Wales Cricket Board, which was recently forced to publicly deny reports that the four sides would operate a “shadow ban” on picking players from Pakistan. The Sunrisers are owned by the SUN media group, which also runs franchises in Hyderabad and Eastern Cape. It had to fight hard for him after being drawn into a bidding war with the Trent Rockets.
Ahmed, 27, is third in the world in the men’s international T20 bowling rankings. He is one of only a handful of Pakistani players to be signed by Indian-owned teams around the world. The head coach, Dan Vettori, insisted it was strictly a cricket decision. “There wasn’t a discussion, it was just about who was the best option for is. We missed out on Adil Rashid, so then the priority was to get a spin bowler, and we didn’t think that quality was in the local market so we had to look overseas.”
The Sunrisers faced an immediate backlash online. The announcement they posted on X received a barrage of angry replies from outraged Indian fans.
Ahmed is a controversial figure among the Indian online cricket community because he once posted a selfie with the caption “Having the last cup of FANTASTIC evening TEA before Ramadan begins”. The post was widely interpreted to be a reference to a meme about Wing Commander Abhinandan Varthaman, an Indian fighter pilot who was shot down and captured during a dogfight in Jammu and Kashmir in 2019, and who then appeared in a video talking about the “fantastic tea” he had been given while he was in Pakistani captivity.
There is a suspicion that everyone involved in all sides of this particular argument may be guilty of spending too much time online, but all the same, Indian spinner Varun Chakravarthy only just celebrated India’s victory in the T20 World Cup by posting a picture of himself drinking a cup of tea while holding the trophy, with the caption “a lot of distance was travelled to get a taste of this cup”, which was widely reported to be a dig at Ahmed.
Ahmed was not the only Pakistani player to be picked up. His teammate Usman Tariq, infamous for the long pause in the middle of his unorthodox bowling action, was bought for £140,000 by Birmingham Phoenix, who are part-owned by the US investment firm Knighthead Capital. Shadab Khan, Saim Ayub and Haris Rauf, who were among the top 50 players in the auction, all went unsold. Phoenix also brought Mustafizur Rahman, whose recent dismissal from the IPL on political grounds sparked Bangladesh’s boycott of the T20 World Cup.
ECB prevent Ashes players speaking ahead of county season
ShowEngland's Ashes contingent will not be speaking to the media ahead of the county season after an intervention from the England and Wales Cricket Board.
The domestic season gets under way on 3 April, with the traditional round of media days being held by all 18 teams over the next three weeks.
But those involved with England during their troubled 4-1 defeat in Australia are not currently cleared to field questions, according to sources in the county game.
While Jacob Bethell, Ben Duckett, Jofra Archer, Will Jacks and Brydon Carse will be absent due to involvement in the Indian Premier League, the other 11 players are not being made available.
That number includes captain Ben Stokes, Harry Brook, Joe Root, Gus Atkinson, Zak Crawley, Ollie Pope, Matthew Potts, Jamie Smith, Josh Tongue, Mark Wood and Shoaib Bashir, several of whom had already been provisionally offered for interview by their counties.
The Press Association understands the ECB is planning to put forward chief executive Richard Gould and team director Rob Key for a media briefing to reflect on the events of the winter in the coming weeks and do not want individual players to face questions before the management have had their say.
There is some frustration among county camps, who feel the attraction of big name internationals helps shine a spotlight on the first-class game.
Players who do line up at the start of the Rothesay County Championship season are still likely to be made available for standard end-of-play interviews with attending media, dependent on performance.
The complications around Ahmed made the extraordinary story of Sussex’s all-rounder James Coles seem fairly straightforward in comparison, but this, too, is a clear sign of the ways in which English cricket is changing. Coles became the most expensive player sold on the day when he was bought by London Spirit for £390,000. He’s 21 and hasn’t played international cricket, but won two man of the match awards in seven games for Sunrisers Eastern Cape this winter. He bats in the top six, bowls left-arm spin and just took eight wickets in three T20 games for England Lions against Pakistan’s A team during a series in Abu Dhabi.
Young English players are at a premium because the teams expect to be able to build around them for the next three years of the competition. But even so, it was an astonishing turn of events given that he is now the fourth best-paid player in the tournament, behind Harry Brook, Phil Salt and Jofra Archer. London Spirit could have bought both Liam Dawson and Rashid Khan for the same money and had change left over. Or to put it another way, they could have bought his new teammate Mason Crane 11 times over and had enough money left for another to be 12th man.
London Spirit’s head coach, Andy Flower, insisted that Coles had been sold for only “a little more” than his side expected to pay for him.
