The IPL may be more business than cricket at times and the Gujarat Titans may stand to benefit financially from the Hardik Pandya trade deal, but purely from a cricketing perspective, this is a landslide victory for the Mumbai Indians, writes Naman Agarwal.

It’s no secret that the Indian Premier League is more than just the cricket that happens on the field. Cricket might be the centre of attention, but winning games isn’t always at the centre of decision-making. Making money – lots of it – is usually the driving force behind most decisions, be it at the board level or the franchise level.

Gujarat trading their title-winning captain in an all-cash deal with Mumbai is a prime example of that.

In the player draft before the IPL 2022 mega auction, the Titans signed Pandya as their captain for INR 15 crores after he had been released by Mumbai Indians. He led them to victory in their first season and missed out on repeating the same in their second by the barest of margins.

In between, he batted in the top order and opened the bowling, scoring more than 800 runs at nearly 38, and took 11 wickets at 8.1 runs per over. Pandya for Gujarat was as close to the complete T20 cricketer as you can get. And yet, they have traded him back to Mumbai Indians ahead of the IPL 2024 auction for his price tag of 15 crores plus an undisclosed ‘transfer fee’.

Now unless this fee is multiple times that of Pandya’s official price tag, this deal would make no sense for Gujarat. In fact, even if it is (which it is rumoured to be), and even if you are to play devil’s advocate, you’d find it hard to make a strong case for Gujarat gaining anything out of this apart from a potentially fat cheque.

The category of cricketers Pandya represents is arguably the most sought-after in the sport. You don’t have to be an exceptional fast-bowling all-rounder to earn the big bucks, particularly if you’re from India, a market with an alarming scarcity of this resource. But if you happen to be the best in the country and one of the best in the world with leadership skills to boot, franchises would, in an ideal world, do anything to not let you go.

But in the far-from-ideal landscape of the IPL, Pandya has been let go for the second time in his career, twice more than what should have been the case. The first was when Mumbai decided to retain an ageing Kieron Pollard ahead of Pandya before the mega auction of 2022, and the second is now, when they seem to have realised their mistake and have essentially poached him back from Gujarat.

There have been innumerous instances over the years of teams acquiring quality players without thinking of how they’d fit in their set up. It has resulted in sub-optimal use of resources and teams have consequently had to let those players go. That wasn’t the case with Pandya and Gujarat. In fact, that can never be the case with someone like him.

Teams would strategise and structure themselves around players of Pandya’s skills and calibre instead of trying to fit him in. Gujarat did that themselves. Pandya was central to the structure of their squad, in every department. He held their batting together as others batted around him, and set the tone with the new ball, swinging it both ways and building pressure, allowing others to cash in.

Now he will do all that for Mumbai, who by the way, already have an ensemble cast, boasting of Rohit Sharma, Ishan Kishan, Suryakumar Yadav, Tilak Varma, Tim David, and Jasprit Bumrah. Gujarat, on the other hand, will be left fending for themselves at the auction hoping they can sew together multiple buys that can potentially match what one player provided. That’s like a Robin Hood deal, but in reverse.

For the Pandya trade to go through, Mumbai needed money in their bank (the kind that is on the table, not under). In a last-minute deal, they traded out Cam Green to the Royal Challengers Bangalore in another all-cash deal for 17.5 crores, paving the way for Pandya’s return.

Having bought Green in the mini-auction last season, Mumbai were unable to find an ideal role for him with either bat or ball. He floated around the batting order and often bowled just to fill in the overs. With Pandya, both those issues will be sorted. He can slot right back in at No.5, where he bats for India in T20Is, with Tilak and David on either side of him, and take the new ball alongside Bumrah.

Then there’s also the small matter of captaincy. Rohit Sharma’s future in the shortest format is uncertain. He is past 36 and Mumbai needed a succession plan as far as leadership was concerned. Where IPL teams often struggle to find captains, Mumbai have ensured that their transition will be from an IPL-winning one who led India in the previous T20 World Cup to the one who may lead them in the next.

Gujarat can still find a way to be among the top teams in the IPL going forward. They might even find a way to defeat Mumbai the next time they meet on the field. For now, though, they have been beaten fair and square off the field.

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