PKL Season 8 Auction Series: Season 1 Champions Jaipur will look to find their missing form this season
Jaipur Pink Panthers, champions of PKL 1 have hardly managed to qualify for the playoffs in recent seasons. However, this auction gave them enough opportunity to rebuild their squad.
In this article, we will have a look at their auction buys in each department i.e. Raiders, Defenders and All-rounders through an analysis.
In raiding department, we can see that they had bought total 6 players at nearly base price except Arjun Deshwal (INR 96 lakhs) along with Sushil Gulia as retained existing new young player. As they have good amount of mixture of young and experienced players their team looks well balanced on paper. But, still due to too many youngsters coming into the team there may be workload on Arjun, Deepak, and Dharmaraj and other players.
In terms of strength, all 3 departments looks well balanced i.e. raiding, defending, allrounders. They had a similar kind of squad last season as well but they haven’t been able to make it to the playoffs as these players failed to meet their expectations from the management.
In the defense department, we can notice that they had bought 4 players i.e. Sandeep Dhull, quality left corner will definitely provide value to the team along the experienced Dharmaraj who has the ability to play both right – left corner, this might be one of asset that can work in favour of the team.
They had bought only 1 all-rounder i.e. Deepak Hooda (INR 55 lakhs) into their team and had Nitin Rawal and Sachin Narwal as retained new young players. Hooda brothers will have the immense responsibility to control their defense department as well. Panthers have to forget all their previous season’s performances and have to start afresh this season from the 1st match itself in order to get that momentum.