Monday, January 10, 2011

10 teams + 10 commandments = Twenty20

Image Courtesy: www.travelpod.com

L Suresh examines the 10 commandments that emerged from the IPL auction.

A weekend when adults played monopoly. A shopping spree when some players became much sought-after possessions while others were treated like perishable items in a distress sale. A frosty winter session when cold, calculative minds advised billionaires on how to create millionaires out of young cricketers. 14 hours when heroes were brought down and their younger replacements unveiled.

12 cricketers retained. A further 127 sold (or bought, depending on whom your sympathies are with). 215 sent back home with their price tags still stuck to their backsides. (“Do they have to come in and stand in the room when they are being auctioned?” an uninformed friend asked me.)

One sweeping look at the 10 huddles across the room (anything more than a split-second glance would have been a waste of time as the scenery stayed the same for 13 hours and 58 minutes – the two minutes of dissonance occurred when Sidhartha Mallya went across to the Kings XI table to wage war over a youngster to whom at least two franchisees were ready to hand their future over to.) would have conveyed the prevailing mood amongst various camps – unlike the first bidding session, there were to be no sacred cows, only cash cows. God, King Midas and the Butcher were already held back by their teams. The rest would now contest for their Hummers and farmhouses.

Finally, as the dust settled, one did not get the feeling of having witnessed a Greek epic. But the makings of a Bollywood potboiler were there, alright. There was great tragedy, action, slapstick comedy, euphoria, money bags, anti-climaxes, sub-plots, a mammoth star cast… and a grand finale when everyone goes home happy humming the familiar song that gives all lost and found sequences a happy ending - ‘We are family’.

Surprisingly, the auction also left behind a message – to be specific, 10 of them.

1. You shall not change a winning combination

It's the oldest rule in the cricketing book. That's exactly what the Chennai Superkings – and to an extent, Mumbai Indians, did. And by doing so, they were not only reuniting players who had played together, they were also bringing back the team that had won together.

2. You shall not make changes for the sake of making changes

Why did the Deccan Chargers not retain Adam Gilchrist, Rohit Sharma, Andrew Symonds and Ryan Harris? Why did the Royal Challengers let go of Dale Steyn and Ross Taylor, or the Delhi Daredevils, Gautam Gambhir and Dirk Nannes? More importantly, do they believe that they have got equivalent or better replacements in players like Morne Morkel and Aaron Finch?

Sweeping changes, fresh starts and clean slates may work well for election campaigns, but seldom do in team selection. For one, a new team with people speaking different languages will take time to settle down together. Creating a team culture, understanding strengths and weaknesses, complementing one another on the field, finding the best combination, working out strategies based on the men at one's disposal – half the IPL would be over by the time this checklist is completed.

Kochi and Pune don't have a choice in the matter. Kings XI and Knightriders would possibly have wanted to make big changes after having found themselves not only at the bottom of the barrel, but also in the midst of controversies. But as for the other six teams, the prudent thing would have been to create an existing nucleus and build a team around them. Instead, they pressed the plunger and ripped existing teams to smithereens.

3. You shall swallow your pride, even if you’ve won the ashes

Brendon McCullum goes for $475,000 while Uthappa goes for $2,000,000. Brad Haddin goes for $325,000 while Dinesh Karthik fetched $900,000, a figure that bracketed him with another keeper, Gilchrist. Sreesanth's performance in South Africa works in his favour, but an English win down under does nothing for the Queen's men. As far as the auctions went, they were dubbed the barmy army – a bunch of players who were nuts if they thought if they would get the kind of base prices that they had quoted.

As for other foreign players, the menu was bitter right through – besides swallowing pride, they had to eat crow, some humble pie and for the betting kind, their hats too. The West Indian batting trio of Lara, Chanderpaul and Sarwan, Lankan legends like Vaas and Jayasuriya, and of course, James Anderson and Graeme Swann who are still dusting the ashes from their cricketing whites will now follow the IPL Season 4 from vantage points in their living rooms.

4. You shall aim for the future, even if you don’t know where it is

Saurabh Tiwary ($1,600,000). Dan Christian ($900,000). Umesh Yadav ($750,000). Obviously there were team think-tanks out there that saw things that the rest of us mortals didn't. Whether these are the players who will become the stars of IPL Seasons 4, 5 and 6 remains to be seen. It began as speculative bidding. Let’s hope that it does not end as retirement benefits. Moral of the story: If the team's think-tank doesn't think, the team will tank...

5. You shall not fit square pegs into round holes, but you can fit allrounders anywhere

The last time Irfan Pathan played a test was in 2008. He showed up for his last ODI in Feb 2009 and for his last T20 match, four months later. It's almost been a year since he's featured in a domestic match. And yet, when the clarion call for an allrounder was sounded, Delhi Daredevils saw him larger-than-life and downloaded a cartful of dollars - $1,900,000 to be precise - on his lap. Other teams clamoured for allrounders too. Abhishek Nayar went at $800,000, Ravindra Jadeja at $950,000, Angelo Mathews at $950,000 and of course, Yusuf Pathan – he of the recent Kiwi carnage in Bengaluru – for $2,100,000. One just hopes that the franchises are understanding enough to give their allrounders enough time to count the dollars before they can land up for the games.

6. You shall not throw money around, but overthrows are allowed

What do you do when you release a rarely used player from your fold? Simple, you buy him for 4.5 times the amount. That's what the Rajasthan Royals – the team that came in with a little legal hole in their purse which drained them of a couple of millions even before the auctions began – did when they bought back Johan Botha for $950,000. Team Kochi meanwhile decided that local flavour was worth any amount and went into an aggressive price war for Sreesanth who was finally bought at $900,000. Venugopala Rao for $700,000 brings a familiar question always asked in cricketing circles – is he related, by any chance?

7. You shall not listen to ex-cricketers; they are good for action, not auction

What's common to Darren Lehman, Geoff Marsh, Geoff Lawson and Michael Bevan, besides the fact that they're all Australian? And the fact that they have all tasted success at the highest form, both as players and as coaches? All of them froze like deer caught in headlights when the auction was on, leaving their lesser competent team-members to wreak havoc with the numbers and team composition. Would Bevan be able to explain Piyush Chawla's $900,000 price tag? Or would Lawson be able to expect much from a bowling attach comprising Sreesanth, R P Singh, Ramesh Powar and Vinay Kumar? Surely Marsh hasn't seen rare footage of Uthappa that we seem to have missed, for him to be bought at $2,100,000?

Looking at performance of the Australian players in the Ashes, you would think that as a cricketing nation, they’ve lost the plot. Looking at their ex-players performing at the IPL auction, you’re sure of it.

8. You shall stay away from controversial players; learn to differentiate between good buys and good-byes

One of the first items in the clean-up agenda adopted by various franchises was to get rid of controversies and those who caused it. While a diktat seemed to have been issued against Gibbs (post his autobiography), others like Gayle who found themselves in the center of the tornado at KKR simply found no takers. Surely performance could have nothing to do with this – while Gayle remained unsold at the auction, in another hemisphere, he was stirring up a performance worthy of his name, slamming 32 off an over in the Twenty20 Big Bash match between Western Australia (whom he played for) and NSW.

Of course, the buzz for the weekend for all news channels was the total, unemotional and comprehensive send-off that Sourav was given. While 10 franchises heaved a sigh of relief that he wasn’t brought back into the auction a second time, a different kind of heaving was witnessed in the east as Kolkata played the angry mother, nostrils flared and chest heaving, indignant that her favourite son was being given a raw deal.

A whole city got together to damn the franchises. The teams however, gave a damn.

9. You shall make as many confounding decisions in two days before the BCCI takes over for the rest of the year

If Deccan Chargers play on till the finals, they stand to lose their wicketkeeper-captain and leading batsman as Sri Lanka’s tour of England would be underway by then, leaving Sangakkara and Kevin Pietersen to make an airdash so that they slip into their cricketing whites just in time for the first test. Delhi Daredevils went through 350 players and finally chose one part-time spinner in Roelof van der Merwe, knowing very well how crucial spin would be in India. Kings XI Punjab bought a second wicketkeeper (Dinesh Karthik) for $900,000 despite having invested in a keeper-captain (Adam Gilchrist) for the same amount. Rajasthan Royals didn’t bother shopping for a keeper at all. Meanwhile, Kings XI Punjab and the Deccan Chargers saved up over $2,000,000 for reasons known only to them. And then those confounding decisions on paying Indian pacers (and spinner, if you include Piyush Chawla) huge sums with no guarantee of their performance.

It was as if Mr. Bean, Jacques Clouseau, and the Dumb and Dumber duo were competing with one another at the auctions. Sadly, the show could last for just two days.

10. You shall spend as if there is no tomorrow… because there really may be no tomorrow if you are RR, KXI or Kochi

The next edition of the auction could well happen at the ICC headquarters, in Dubai, to coincide with the Dubai shopping festival. Looking at the way most franchises splurged, you would think that they were sure of the world coming to an end much before 2012. Can’t blame them though. Till the very end, there were franchises that were more worried about fitting into the IPL’s scheme of things before they figured out the players who would fit into their team.

11. You shall select allrounders if you must, but not multi-faceted players

Well, considering the fact that there are only 10 commandments, this is more a comment than a commandment. Players will multiple skills were definitely preferred by most franchises, but Iain O’Brien was rejected for this precise reason. He was not only a gifted cricketer, but also a terrific blogger.

The point was, no franchise was willing to be the starting point for a new blog on the IPL, this time titled ‘Real IPL Player’.






1 comment:

Switch hit said...

Wonderful thought process and awesome way of expressing the same... Kudos