Rajasthan Royals fielding coach Dishant Yagnik opened up on Rajasthan Royals’ ideology, stating that the team aspires to make stars, rather than buying them. The team was subjected to immense criticism after being eliminated from the playoffs race in IPL 2025.
Rajasthan Royals have been called out several times in the ongoing IPL 2025 season for their poor auction strategy. They have paid heavy bucks for the likes of Shimron Hetmyer and Dhruv Jurel, but the cricketers haven’t done justice to the price tags. Jurel was retained for INR 14 crore and Hetmyer for INR 11 crore, and that invited criticism in RR’s way, especially as the team management released the likes of Jos Buttler, Yuzvendra Chahal and Trent Boult among others.
Against Mumbai Indians on May 1, Rajasthan suffered a 100-run defeat and are officially out of the playoffs race. After the match, fielding coach Dishant Yagnik noted that the team was investing in the future and for the same reason, the likes of Buttler and Chahal were not retained. He added that RR’s ideology has always been to make stars rather than buy them and they followed the same principle ahead of the 2025 season.
“Whenever a new player has entered our side over the years, they weren’t stars already. They became stars at our franchise. The current bunch, we’re confident that they will become stars, we’ll make them stars. We don’t buy superstars, we make superstars, that’s our tagline,” Yagnik explained during the post-match press conference.
“For example, take Vaibhav Suryavanshi, everyone was happy and emotional for him the way he batted. So, in the coming years, guys like him will become stars. Time has come for us to look beyond such things (regretting not retaining players like Buttler). When we don’t have them, we have to forget and move on. Now we have Vaibhav, Yashasvi Jaiswal, Sanju Samson is our captain. We’ll go ahead with this side and we’ll prove our winning ability with this side,” he added.
Ahead of the match against Mumbai, head coach Rahul Dravid also echoed the same sentiments, stating that they were happy with the auction and if results in certain games went their way, things could have been different.