Irish Twenty20 cricket heros Kevin and Niall O’Brien are among 144 cricketers from around the world hoping to be snapped up in the annual Indian Premier League auction in Bangalore this weekend.
The IPL, which takes place between 4 April and 27 May this year, offers a chance for some of the world’s most explosive cricketers to make a fairly quick shilling. While at the same time entertaining the growing legion of Twenty20 supporters around the globe, of course.
Kevin O’Brien is available for a base price of $50,000, which looks a snip for a player who scored the fastest ever Cricket World Cup century with his 50-ball hundred in Ireland’s cherished demolition of England last year.
That game took place in Bangalore, the same city which hosts Saturday’s Indian Premier League player auction, and O’Brien is looking forward to the prospect of making his IPL debut.
Amazingly, the big red-mopped lad from the Railway Union club in Dublin subsequently bettered that 100 with a 44-ball century for Gloucester in a Twenty20 match against Middlesex.
Quoted on Sky Sports, he said, “The IPL is a great tournament. For six weeks, you get to play with and against the best players in the world. As an Irishman, coming from a country with a small pool of players, that’s very special.
“The last four or five years have been great [for Irish cricket] and the team will only get stronger in the next four or five years and last week you had Warren Deutrom saying he wanted Ireland to be a Test nation by 2020. These are exciting times for Irish cricket.”
O’Brien is joined in this week’s auction by his older brother, wicket-keeper/batsman Niall, who is also hoping for a first ever IPL contract – Niall has previously played in the second tier Indian Cricket League with the Delhi Jets.
