IPL 5 - Auction and Richard Madley

To our ordinary eyes, they look like any ordinary bench and not so useful coat stand – but believe they had just been sold for Rs.2.90 lakhs and Rs.1.93 lakhs respectively.   

Victorian oak hall bench and walnut coatstand

They were sold at Christie’s – a  name and place that claims of  extraordinary art, unparalleled service and expertise. Founded in 1766 by James Christie, Christie's conducted the greatest auctions of the 18th, 19th and 20th centuries, and today remains a popular showcase for the unique and the beautiful. – but any of their expertise may not have helped in conduct of an entirely different auction – that of Cricket players for IPL.  

Richard Madley, is the man, he has done it before in 2008  with eight teams spending over $40 million in eight hours to ‘own’ 75 best cricket players in the world;  he was back in 2011 and now he will again be conducting the  IPL Player Auction 2012  on Saturday, 4 February 2012, at the ITC Royal Gardenia Hotel, Bengaluru.

The 2012 Indian Premier League season-  IPL 5 or IPL 2012, will be the fifth season of the Indian Premier League, established by the Board of Control for Cricket in India (BCCI) in 2007.  The tournament will begin on April 4 and end May 27 2012.  This season the number of teams in the league went from ten to nine with the termination Kochi Tuskers Kerala.  The IPL Committee has terminated the IPL franchise Kochi Tuskers Kerala. Despite KTK's efforts, the court haven't given them any relief and the IPL Governing Council decided that the tournament be reduced to 9 teams. KTK players will participate in IPL 2012. KTK players have been included in the list of players to be auctioned in the Players' Auction on 4th February 2012.  The Auction proceedings will  begin at 11:00 am and will broadcast live by IPL Indian broadcaster Sony Set Max.

Earlier, there was this IPL 2012 Transfer Window for trading players  provided  by IPL governing council. In the first transfer window held between Dec 15,2011 to Jan 20, 2012 there  was no financial cap on trading though each franchise were allowed to  add maximum four players to their existing squad from this trading window.  The following six transfers took place :

Player	From	To
Dinesh Karthik	Kings XI Punjab	Mumbai Indians
R Sathish	Mumbai Indians	Kings Xi Punjab
Kevin Pietersen	Deccan Chargers	Delhi Daredevils
Harmeet Singh	Deccan Chargers	Kings Xi Punjab
Andrew McDonald	Delhi Daredevils	RCB
Pragyan Ojha	Deccan Chargers	Mumbai Indians

Dinesh Karthik moved from Kings XI to MI for an undisclosed sum – easily the highest sum paid to buy a player from another club.  There are some reports that MI paid Rs.12.4 crores  ($2.35 million) to KXI who had bought him at $900,000 in 2011.   Rajagopal Sathish is an uncapped player, in fact played well in ICL and is to be Rs 30 lakhs ($56,619) for the season by Kings XI according to IPL rules.  The rest you can imagine !

Last year it was cash-riot as 10 franchisees spent  $62.8 million among them to buy a total of 82 foreigners and 45 Indian players at the 2011 auction. The numbers are excluding retained players. The present  auction would pale in comparison as there is a cap  $16.94 million left with the nine teams that will take part in IPL 5.  – that would mean that each team would have less than 10 crores Indian rupees less any money spent on  re-signing players like Sourav Ganguly and Chris Gayle. There are  144 players  available in the auction  at prices ranging from $400,000 to $20,000, [Rs.2.87 crores to 9.37 lakhs] – there are 7 Indians from the defunct Kochi Tuskers team.  They are VVS Laxman, Rudra Pratap singh, Sreesanth, Ravindra Jadeja, Parthiv Patel, Ramesh Powar and Vinaykumar – not to speak of VRV Singh who has a base price of $100000. 

Then there are vying for 29 spots, with each team allowed a maximum of 11 foreigners - up from the earlier 10 - following a rule revamp after Kochi were shown the door. The rule of a maximum of four foreigners in the playing XI, though, remains. This means as many as 107 foreigners will not be sold in the auction.   Those foreign players include :  Australia’s – Brad Hogg, Mitchell Johnson, Peter Siddle, Adam Voges, Luke Ronchi, Stuart Mcgill, Usman Khwaja; England’s James Anderson, Ian Bell, Owasis Shah, Ravi Bopara, Matt Prior, Greame Swann; Newzealand’s Brendon Mccullum, Jacob Oram, Kyle Mills, Lou Vincent, Tim Southee, Ian Butler; South Africans Mark Boucher, Hersh Gibbs, Nicky Boje, Justin Kemp, Jacques Rudolph, Morne Van wyk, Vernon Philander, Imran Tahir, Paul Harris; Lankans – Mahela Jayawardene, Muttiah Muralitharah, Dilhara Fernando, Upul Tharanga, Farveez Maharoof, Ajantha Mendis,; West Indians Ramnaresh Sarwan, Marlon Samuels, Dwayne Smith, Ravi Rampaul, Fidel Edwards, Lendl Simmons, Adrian Barath; Zimbabwe’s Prosper Utseya, Hamilton Masakadza, Charles Coventry – and big list of uncapped players.

Obviously, all of them may not find takers. For the franchises, most of whom have astute cricketing brains working for them, have been quietly doing their homework on some of the lesser names, especially those who have caught the eye in tournaments such as the Champions League T20 and the Big Bash. Talent scouts have been busy travelling, looking out for a talented performer they can acquire cheaply.   Yet with all such acumen, computers and brain work, teams fumbled and ended up bidding very high for some players and not having the balance in end.

Whether any reason would reign or would it continue to be rat-race would be seen and known tomorrow. Should be big fun watching this !!

With regards – S. Sampathkumar.