Mumbai Indians are five-time IPL champions.
Mumbai Indians (MI) franchise is known for unearthing talent from domestic cricket and making them stars. Some of the names that got their fame in IPL with MI include the Pandya brothers Krunal and Hardik and Gujarat pacer Jasprit Bumrah and spinner Axar Patel, amongst others.
Nita Ambani, chairperson of the Reliance Foundation and a member of the International Olympic Committee, recently discussed how her scouting team discovered talent like Pandya and Bumrah at the Mumbai Indians.
Ambani stated that she personally visited domestic tournaments to scout prospects. During this procedure, they came across the Pandya brothers, who were struggling to make ends meet at the time.
“In IPL, we all have a fixed budget, so every team can spend x amount of money, so we had to think about new ways of getting talent… that’s when I thought we should encourage new talent in Mumbai Indians. So I remember scouting for talent, and I used to go to every Ranji Trophy match, and my scouts and I would go to all these domestic cricket matches. And one day, our scouts took two young, lanky, thin boys to the camp,” she said at an event in Boston.
“I was talking to them, and they said that for three years, they’ve eaten nothing but Maggi noodles because they’ve had no money. But in them, I saw the spirit, the passion, and the hunger that they wanted to make it big. Those two brothers were Hardik Pandya and Krunal Pandya. In 2015, I bought Hardik Pandya at 10 thousand US dollars in the auction, and today, he’s the proud captain of Mumbai Indians,” she added.
Nita Ambani also shared the story of how Mumbai Indians spotted Jasprit Bumrah and Tilak Varma.
“The next year, our scouts got one young cricketer with an odd body language, and they said watch him bowl. We watched him he could just speak to the ball. That was our Bumrah, and the rest is history. Last year, we launched Tilak Varma, and now he is a proud member of Team India. So I think Mumbai Indians is rightfully called the nursery of cricket in India,” she said.
Hardik Pandya and Jasprit Bumrah have captained India as well, while Pandya is currently the captain of the MI team.
(Firstpost inputs)