The IPL Auction: Cricket's Immovable Pageant

But don’t let the familiarity fool you. Every year hints at new directions, new possibilities.

Gideon Haigh

The Indian Premier League auction is leaving home.  After a decade and a half flitting between five-star hotels in India, the annual saturnalia will unfold in the UAE next Wednesday, gaining another corporate embossment.  The paddles of intrepid owners, anxious coaches and their auxiliaries will duel at Coca-Cola Arena, on Dubai’s City Walk, implying something more spectacular in the offing - maybe Arjit Singh running karaoke or Amitabh Bachchan jumping out of a cake.

The IPL is nominally a mini-auction, and the most dramatic player movement has actually already been heralded - the tectonic shift of Hardik Pandya from Gujarat Titans to Mumbai Indians.  But this also maximises the drama and the stakes.  A total of 1166 players, including Pat Cummins, Mitchell Starc, Josh Hazlewood and Travis Head, have registered for a mere 77 available spots.   Only 40 of 830 Indians and 37 of 336 overseas players will be acquired.  Everyone loves the rags-to-riches stories - the fifth son of the tuk tuk driver with a wooden leg suddenly able to buy a suburb.  Yet among India’s more than 1000 registered first-class cricketers, there will remain many, many more have nots than have yachts afterwards. 

Loyalty, moreover, has a shelf life between that of milk and yoghurt.  Remember the last IPL auction when the Mumbai Indians presented as offering Cameron Green a long-term home.  ‘We have been following and tracking Cameron Green for the last two-three years and…we thought that he is exactly what we needed,’ said Reliance JIO chairman Akash Ambani.  ‘If you have noticed, over the last two auctions, we have deliberately picked players that are on the younger side and give us more lifetime value and that's why we thought that Cameron is the perfect guy for us to come in.’  Perfect until he wasn’t, which was the point at which Pandya began chafing to return to his former home, and the salary cap impinged. As part of his trade, Green’s ‘lifetime value’ has been rerouted to Royal Challengers Bangalore. 

Don’t fancy that the sauve qui peut ethos affects only men either, now that women’s cricket, historically more equitable and collegial, is wrapping itself in the WPL’s fragrant embrace.  Nobody batted an eyelash at the Women’s Premier League auction, held in a plush Mumbai hotel last weekend, when Annabel Sutherland was judged by her new franchise to be worth thrice what new Australian captain Alyssa Healy is paid by hers, and probably more than her brother earns for Victoria.  Not bad for someone who made 28 runs in four innings and went at 12-an-over in the inaugural tournament, but that’s show biz.

Further accentuating the IPL auction’s magnitude is that this is it.  This is how franchises come by their talent.  Yes, they arrive well-informed by scouts and spotters.  Yes, they come rich in resources and dense with data. But they are investors not altruists; they are buyers not breeders.  The IPL’s boosters often make the case for its pedagogic value - the education available to a new player from being captained by Dhoni, batting with Virat,  bowling with Bumrah etc. Yet this obscures that the relation of franchise cricket to the rest of the game remains fundamentally parasitic.  The IPL performs none of the tasks preliminary to a cricket career, which remain the prerogative of non-profit stakeholders: associations, boards, clubs, unpaid volunteers, parents even.  In India there also exists the intermediate step of the many thousands of private cricket academies.  But a franchise is interested exclusively in its own needs, not in cricket’s.  And where has been the point taking an interest in a young cricketer only for him to be a/ useful only two months a year and b/ liable for purchase by someone else?  Thus the franchise world formula of nationalised costs and privatised profits.

Still, maybe, just maybe, this stands to change, at least a little.  For the IPL, as we know, is itself leaving home, its owners having linked a daisy chain of investments in the world’s other franchise competitions - the ILT20, the SA20, the Caribbean Premier League.  They have, while doing so, also taken tentative steps into the talent development sphere.  Though nothing has been established to rival, say, Barcelona’s fabled La Marcia or Manchester United’s Trafford Training Centre, about half the league’s franchises now operate academies.  The Rajasthan Royals have operated an academy in London for almost five years; the Chennai Super Kings opened a new academy in Dallas in July; the Delhi Capitals boast that Yash Dhull got his start as a 13-year-old at their Bal Bhavan Academy before going on to lead India to the last under-19 World Cup.  All of which raise some interesting questions - scenarios that might arise where cricket was effectively pitted against itself.  A gun fifteen-year-old West Indian, a new Brian Lara who might reignite Test cricket in the Caribbean, turns out to have had his first exposure to cricket at an academy operated by an IPL franchise.  To whom does he owe his chief loyalty?  We probably already know the answer…..

The issue of who pays for what in cricket was placed in perspective a few months ago by Surrey’s grand old man Alec Stewart, who observed how English players were increasingly treating their counties as amenities rather than abodes - somewhere they had a net or two, got treatment for niggles and picked up their mail before jetting off to more lucrative engagements.

‘We want all the players to earn big money,’ said Stewart.  ‘We aren’t here to deprive them. But players have to understand that when they’re here, they’re ours.  When they’re with a franchise, they are their player. But we are the ones who give them a twelve-month contract, twelve months’ health insurance, twelve months’ physio provision, twelve months of coaching, getting our coaches to use a sidearm to prepare them for conditions. Where does that fit in the bigger picture? Which for us is Surrey and England.’  

For you, Stewy, yes.  But for whom else?  This blurring of boundaries was exemplified recently when the new ‘Director - Talent Search and Academies’ at Lucknow Super Giants turned out to be erstwhile Indian chief selector MSK Prasad, placing all his expertise and contacts in the official game at the service of private enterprise.  Interesting times!  Over the IPL’s history, the auction has become a familiar, even immovable, part of cricket’s annual pageant.  But don’t let the familiarity fool you.  Every year hints at new directions, new possibilities.