Ricky Ponting, who admitted that he was suprised at his low price, has ruled out any friction in the Australian dressing room over the difference in bidding prices

Melbourne: Australian captain Ricky Ponting is disappointed at the low bid price he attracted at the Indian Premier League auction which saw him being sold for much less than the likes of compatriots Cameron White and David Hussey.

Shah Rukh Khan’s Calcutta team bought Ponting for $400,000, which is $300,000 and $100,000 less than Hussey and White, who are not even regular members of the Australian team.

“I thought I might have been able to attract a little bit more than that,” Ponting said in his first reaction after the high-profile auction.

“The fact I haven’t made a lot of runs over the last couple of weeks probably hasn’t helped much. But realistically, we as Australian players probably won’t be able to take part in the first couple of years of the event anyway.”

The Australian skipper, however, said there would be no friction in the dressing room following the bidding war, rather they would have light-hearted banter among themselves.

“I’ll have a bit of a laugh and joke with everybody. I’ve already sent Symmo (Andrew Symonds) a few messages saying that any time I go out with him from now on it’s his shout, which is not always the case with Symmo either, he’s pretty much the first one to dodge a shout whenever he can,” he said.

Symonds is the second highest earning player in the IPL after Mahendra Singh Dhoni and commanded a bid price of $1.35 million from the Hyderabad team.

Ponting’s Sri Lankan counterpart Mahela Jayawardene was delighted that there were “a few happy faces” after the auction, and was looking forward to work again with former coach Tom Moody.

“It’s good that it’s over now and we can concentrate (although) we were never that much focused on IPL.” (PTI)