IPL Dreams, Big Man and a Tale of Three Cities: How the drama unfolded at recently-held auction – Firstcricket News, Firstpost

This is the story of life and times of a few big men in the recently-concluded IPL auction. For the uninitiated, this was a mega auction where teams had to be built almost from scratch with only a maximum of four players from the previous team which could be retained.

In the 11 years Venky Mysore has been at the helm, KKR have made the play-offs for the final four seven times and won the title twice. Sportzpics

Preparations for the auction started months before in earnest. In came the strategists, data analysts and number crunchers, coaches and talent scouts and, of course, the team owners. The talking heads and pundits will hardly be left behind, there were talks of team balance between batters, bowlers and of attacking options at the top and of finisher options at the rear, death bowlers and wicket takers. The preparations were hectic and detailed and anticipation was at its peak before the auctions were to be held over two days.

D-Day — lights, camera and action. With TV cameras rolling and live coverage, IPL auctions are a spectacle like no other in all of the sporting world. Drama and theatre. Here millionaires and crorepatis are minted in front of your eyes within a matter of seconds. Rags to riches stories are a legion, IPL auction is a place where dreams are made.

Enter the big honchos, the decision makers — some visible, some invisible. Sunrisers Hyderabad were the invisible type. Their bidding was controlled by a mysterious person at the other end of the phone without whose blessing their bidding just could not proceed. What was amazing was that bidding for every incremental amount needed a long telephonic conversation. Why a maximum limit could not be set for the team at auction table to proceed befuddles imagination. The result of all this bid-by-bid micro-management — a stellar top order of four batters and very little of anything else. The most lopsided team at the end of the auction. What about accountability of the Big Man at the end of that telephone line, you ask. Well, you just hope that there is a Bigger Man who will wield the stick and ensure that he gets nowhere near that team in future.

Enter the next Big Man, Venky Mysore, the CEO of Kolkata Knight Riders. Mysore comes with an established track record. He had come in a failing franchise with bottom of the table finishes and turned it around. In the 11 years he has been at the helm, KKR has made the play-offs for the final four seven times and won the title twice. Not bad for a failing franchise but decidedly third best behind Mumbai Indians and Chennai Super Kings.

Anybody who is a KKR fan will tell you that following this team is a roller-coaster ride, they go from a high to a low in a matter of days let alone across seasons. Mysore has a fatal attraction. For superstars. Maybe that’s one of the reasons he is an ideal fit for KKR, a team owned by glamorous superstars. Mysore always gets his superstars at the auction to the detriment of team balance as he runs out of money by paying through his nose for his superstars. The roller-coaster ride inevitably follows as the team is dependent on few superstars to fire which cannot happen every day. Statistics, law of averages, and cold mathematics are his enemies. This time, he failed. For his middle-order superstar. Plan A was Nicholas Pooran. Mysore went up to bidding Rs 10.50 crore on Day 1, it did not happen. On Day 2, Plan B, Tim David. He went up to Rs 8 crore, it did not happen (money availability for team composition and required number of minimum players had already started to bite).

Mysore’s face was a sight, colour had drained out completely, his plans had come apart spectacularly. Little did he know his failure was a blessing in disguise. What happened to the Rs 8 crore he had bid for Tim David? In the last hour of the auction KKR got five players for Rs 8 crore—  Sam Billings, Alex Hales, Tim Southee, Mohd Nabi and Umesh Yadav. It changed the complexion of the team. Great balance and a lot of options to implement different strategies and team compositions. Five for the price of one, what a deal! KKR’s auction got saved by a failure. Some wise man once said failures are pillars of success.

Mumbai Indians got Tim David. At the end of Day 1 of the auction, the question on everybody’s mind was what the Mumbai Indians were doing. They were not even participating in the auction. After splurging a record amount of Rs 15.5 crore on Ishan Kishan they had gone into silent mode.

Well, it became crystal clear after the end of Day 2. Zaheer Khan, part of the MI team at the auction table, let out the secret. The management had an IPL dream. The dream was to unite Jasprit Bumrah, India’s premier fast bowler and one of MI’s four retained players, with Jofra Archer, the premier fast bowler of the world. Jofra Archer has to be bought and MI has been saving money all this while for Jofra and as it turned out, for Tim David as well. Both were duly bought at Rs 8 crore and above. MI are now a team of seven superstars and nothing much.

MI, who like Chennai Super Kings, believed in building a strong Indian core and quality all the way have gone the KKR way of foreign superstar dreams. MI fans, get ready for a roller-coaster ride. You can still win the trophy as KKR had shown before but a roller-coaster is inevitable. It will be fun.

The writer is a cricket enthusiast. Views expressed are personal.

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