Mahendra Singh Dhoni didn’t want to be an icon, but Virender Sehwag couldn’t refuse when GMR group offered him that status. As Ravi Shastri and Sunil Gavaskar sat with him to discuss the players’ contract and guidelines for an icon player, the maverick opener knew that opting to represent Delhi could undermine his value in the mega-buck auction. And, as things turned out, Sehwag is now the lowest paid icon player — almost a crore less than Sachin Tendulkar, Sourav Ganguly, Yuvraj Singh and Rahul Dravid. According to sources, the team owners had agreed to match the highest icon amount if Sehwag became the Delhi icon. But it still remains to be seen how a verbal understanding will stand against contract guidelines. Sehwag refused to comment, insisting that he was “happy to lead Delhi.”As per the guidelines, Sehwag will only get 15 per cent more than the highest bidder in his team — in this case Gautam Gambhir at Rs 2.9 crore. Sources indicate that Dhoni’s tag put huge pressure on other icon centres to hike their bids drastically towards the later stages so that their icons got decent pay cheques as compared to Dhoni or Andrew Symonds. That, they say, could be the reason why players such as Ishant Sharma, Irfan Pathan and Rohit Sharma fetched such astronomical sums. Delhi did make a desperate Rs 3.2 cr bid for Ishant, but Kolkata snatched the bid with Rs 3.8 cr. And while Sourav Ganguly laughed all the way to the bank with that deal, Sehwag is left to make even less than Ishant.
