The Hindu Business Line : Dhoni emerges ‘man of the match’ at IPL auction

After nine rounds of bidding for the players, all the eight franchisees of the IPL team together have put in a total of about $36 million to select squad of 16 players each, which will be slugging it out during 59 Twenty20 matches spread over 44 days, beginning April 18. The opening ceremony will be held in Bangalore.

Iconic players Sachin Tendulkar (Mumbai), Sourav Ganguly (Kolkata), Rahul Dravid (Bangalore) and Yuvraj Singh (Mohali) raked in more than a million dollar each as they will get 15 per cent more than the highest bid player of their respective teams. The iconic player of GMR-owned Delhi, Virender Sehwag, will get a little less than one million dollars as the highest bid player of his team, Gautam Gambhir, was priced at $725,000.

Non-binding

The contract is not a binding one, since the players can be swapped or transferred to another team next year, based on a transfer price.

An extra round of bidding was added to auction the reserve pool of 10 players who went unsold at the beginning, including Glenn McGrath, Mohammed Yousuf, Simon Katich and Shivnarain Chanderpaul. Fierceness of the bidding was reflected as the bid amount of some players spiralled high. Ishant Sharma, whose reserve price was just $ 150,000,was picked by Kolkata for $950,000.

Sanath Jayasurya at $975,000 for Mumbai, R.P. Singh at $875,000 for Hyderabad, Irfan Pathan at $925,00 for Mohali, Jacques Kallis at $900,000 for Bangalore, Chris Gayle at $800,000 for Kolkata are the other highest priced players.

At the end of the long day, Shah Rukh Khan, who is the franchisee for Kolkata team, said the auction was held in a friendly atmosphere. “All the franchisees are confident that this will be a viable proposition. It is not as if we have come here to throw out money,” he said.

Some 80 cricketers, including some of the leading names in the sport, were put under the hammer today, with the auction lasting ten hours.

The eight franchisees of IPL—Bollywood star Shah Rukh Khan, actress Preity Zinta, RIL Ltd, GMR Holdings, Vijay Mallya’s UB Group, India Cements Ltd, Deccan Chronicle and Emerging Media—participated in the bidding.

Mr Lalit Modi, Chairman and Commissioner of DLF Indian Premier League, said: “The Governing Council of the league had pulled out all stops to ensure a free, transparent and fair bidding process for a truly historic first ever auction of cricketers in India. I am certain all the franchisees would greatly benefit from the transparency (of the bidding process).”

Open auction

The auction was an open one with each player being individually put up for bidding by the franchisees. Independent professional auctioneer, Mr Richard Madley, conducted the bidding and was also the sole arbiter on all aspects of the auction.

As per the rules set out by IPL, each player had an annual base player fee and this will be the fee at which the bidding for that player started. Each of the eight franchisees had a total purse of up to $5 million to make their bids.

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