Mushfiqur Rahim: you’ve missed your chance now, IPL, and you’ve only got yourselves to blame

There’s only so much rejection a man can take and Mushfiqur Rahim, the Bangledesh wicket-keeper and former captain, has had enough of the IPL – without ever playing a game in it.

In an act the equivalent of the boy who owns all the equipment picking up his bat, the ball and uprooting the stumps and taking them all home after a bad decision in street cricket, the diminutive cricketer, almost seen as a veteran at the tender age of 32, has opted out of the auction for the 2021 tournament after being overlooked 13 times.

Mushfiqur has been part of the auction since the inaugural edition in 2008 but has never found a buyer.

Even last year, he remained unsold at a base price of INR 75 lakhs. The next IPL auction is set to take place on Thursday, February 18, in Chennai.

Nibco, the company which handles Mushfiqur’s account confirmed his departure from the auction at the weekend.

“We have not made any submission for Mushfiqur Rahim for IPL this time,” an official was quoted as saying to New Age, the Dhaka-based English language daily paper.

Mushfiqur’s credentials in T20s are by no stretch of the imagination poor and he has the experience of 202 matches since his debut in 2006, 86 of them for his country, to recommend him. He has notched a commendable 4,288 runs at an average of almost 29 and strike rate of 127.96.

His top score, an unbeaten 98, came against the Cumilla Warriors when he represented the Khulna Tigers in the 2019-20 edition of the Bangladesh Premier League (BPL), a competition in which he is the all-time leading runscorer, with 15 half-centuries to his name.

He tried to make his point in 2019, hitting a match-winning 60 from 43 balls to beat India in Delhi but the franchises remained resolutely unmoved.

Almost 1,100 cricketers have registered to play in this year’s edition, but only five of them are from Bangladesh: Shakib Al-Hasan, Mustafizur Rahman, Soumya Sarker, Liton Das and Mahmudullah. Of those, only all-rounder Shakib and left-arm paceman Mustafizur have played in it before.