Sanil, Divya costliest buys at MSL players' auction

MUMBAI: Mumbai's top ranked players Sanil Shetty and Divya Deshpande were the costliest buys at the players' auctions held for the second edition of the Mumbai Super League table tennis at the National Sports Club of India (NSCI) on Tuesday. The 10-team league will be played from July 7 to 10 at NSCI.
Kool Smashers picked up Shetty for Rs 35,500, highest for any male players for the upcoming league. His base price was 17,000.Divya was bought over by Phantom Stars for Rs 23,000, a record for female players. Her base price was 11,500.
"After the huge success of our inaugural edition last year, we decided to increase number of teams at this year's edition. This time it will be a 10-team league instead of eight teams that participated last year," said table tennis legend Kamlesh Mehta, who is also chairman of the organising committee.
Each team will have six players in their team which will have one player from each category, men, women, junior boys, junior girls, cadet boy and a veteran.
Each of last year's eight teams owner paid Ro 1,50,000 to own a team this year while the new two team owners had to pay Rs 2,00,000 to buy a team. "Each team will pay Rs 80,000 directly to their players. Besides that we will offer nearly Rs 5 lakhs in prize money to players," said Mehta.
The winning team of the league will get Rs 1.5 lakhs while the runner-up will be richer by Rs 1 lakh. Both the losing semi-finalist will get Rs 50,000 each.