This is the second post, in a four-part post. I’d pinged each of the four MPL 2012 team captains to send me, in their own words, their thoughts on how they chose, and why they retained the players that they did.

The following is what the inimitable Sidhu, the former captain of X-Men, sent in.

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Finishing as runners up last year was certainly more than what other teams had given us a chance at the start of the tournament. Yashwanth, Rafeeq and Koundi, one of the costliest buys of the 2012 MPL were a certainity to be retained by any teams in the MPL. I had seen more than a bit of Rohith to be sure that he belonged to the elite league as well.

Now the question which kept irritating me was why on earth the executives of MPL had made the rule of the captain being included in the 4 players to be retained. Clearly I did not deserve to be retained, but even an email to Raghu did not help to change the rules.

Dropping Yashwanth was like committing a crime. He was the heart of X-Men. Rafeeq made the cut partly on his leadership qualities and his economical bowling. Now was the difficult part on whom to drop, Rohith or Koundi? Rohith and Koundi are match winners and dropping Koundi just for a couple of wides in the final would be harsh as hell. But I could not let Rohith go. I felt we needed someone who could hit the big shots at will and Rohith was more than capable of doing that.

One of the thoughts was to let Koundi go and select him in the auction again. That was going to be risky. Should we let go Rafeeq instead, one of my hallway conversations with Yashwanth brought out that thought. There were some suggestions by folks of other teams on not having Rafeeq and Rohith play in the same team, but I was not too inclined to listen to that piece of advice. In the end we let Koundi become a free agent and tried hard (it looked obvious) in the auction to buy him back.

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