Grovedale star Jordan Moran was sold for $50,000 at a cricket auction in Queensland recently to a team run by Darren Lehmann. But he won’t quite earn that amount of money.
Moran was sold for $50,000 in the Century Cricket Brisbane auction to the Bayside Pirates, a team run by former Australian player and coach Darren Lehmann.
Jordan Moran. Picture: Wes Cusworth
The 120th player up at the auction on May 5, Moran was sold just after New South Welshman Stirling McEvoy, who went for an eye-popping $3.1m.
Those figures leap off the page but the sale prices are akin to a fantasy draft.
Each team in the Century Cricket competition had $4m worth of fake coin to play with at the auction.
Moran said he will get “a little bit of coin” for the three-day carnival in August but he was most keen to test himself against strong competition during his pre-season, with former Australian captain Tim Paine among the players on other team lists.
“There’s a couple of players that I have played country cricket champs against and there are a couple of internationals,” he said.
“For Darren Lehmann to ring me the other week and say ‘we know you are an aggressive, left-handed opener, you run hard and field well’, they obviously did some kind of research.
“That was just pretty cool to get a phone call off someone like that saying ‘I want you to play for us’.”
Grovedale batsman Jordan Moran has won the Jack Sing Medal for the GCA1 best and fairest in 2019-20. Picture: Alan Barber
Moran was clueless when an email appeared in his inbox the week before the auction stating he had made the player pool.
After he “did a bit of a ring around to find out what it was”, the GCA star found his Queensland bat maker had applied on his behalf.
Hard-hitter Jake Brown works for the same company, Cooper Cricket, and lit up Century Cricket’s first season with the Northern Kings on his trajectory to an outstanding maiden Big Bash League season with the Brisbane Heat last summer.
Century Cricket has taken up the rules of the Hundred, the English game launched last year as an alternative to T20.
“It will be a nice way to end pre-season, to hit some cricket balls against some blokes I haven’t played against,” Moran said.
“It is another environment and another test.”