Indian Premier League - IPL / Andrew Hughes / 08 February 2009 / Leave a comment

From the high-profile auction to the moment the winning runs are hit, the IPL is a glamorous celebrity event and masterpiece of marketing which has captured the imagination of the cricket world. Andrew Hughes reports on this year's bidding wars...

If the success of a tournament can be judged incolumn inches, then the IPL is a triumph.

The concept of selling cricket stars at a big money auction is particularly shrewd; taking the mundane business of players signing contracts and turning it into a piece of showbiz; a glamorous celebrity event to which few were invited but which grabbed the attention of the cricket world and will be chewed over for days and weeks to come. And all of this for a tournament that won't be taking place for another two months. Small wonder the ECB have given up the uneven fight and scaled down their Premier League.

Though it was a smaller affair than the first IPL auction, last week's event saw some frenzied bidding. Bangladeshi seamer Mashrafe Mortaza, whose base price was a lowly $50,000 became the subject of a tug of war between Kings XI Punjab and Kolkata Knight Riders with the latter team eventually prevailing with a staggering bid of $600,000, making him the fourth most valuable purchase of the evening. There were similarly frenetic battles over the signatures of Jean Paul Duminy (who went for $950,000) and Middlesex's South African Twenty20 specialist, Tyron Henderson, who went under the hammer at $600,000 to last year's champions Rajasthan Royals.

The bidding for Kevin Pietersen and Andrew Flintoff was rather more sedate, perhaps because of their high price or the fact that they will only be available for the first three weeks of this year's tournament. Flintoff went to Chennai Superstars and Pietersen to Bangalore Royal Challengers, both for $1.55m, despite last minute efforts from Rajasthan to steal each. They were the headline grabbing purchases and much was made of the fact that they exceeded the previous top bid of $1.5m for Mahendra Singh Dhoni at the first auction last year.

But in truth, this is not really a fair comparison. Last year's auction was a strange event in which everyone had a lot of money to spend and no-one was really sure how the whole thing was going to work. This time round, with a whole season under their belts, the franchises knew what they were looking for and the bidding was more intense for the fancied players. It is safe to say that had Dhoni or Symonds been available for auction this time round, they might well have gone for close to the maximum $2m figure each franchise had available.

The franchises had some tricky decisions to make. For a start, the Pakistan Cricket Board has prevented any of its players taking part this time around. Many of the Australian and English players will not be available for large chunks of the season. Some players who were injured last year may be available this and vice versa. Some will also have noted how well Rajasthan did last year with their cut-price purchases and will have based their strategy on acquiring uncapped or domestic players outside the auction.

Delhi Daredevils performed well last year, relying on the big hitting opening partnership of Sehwag and Gambhir and some tidy bowling led by McGrath and Vettori. But their batting lacked depth and when the openers failed, as they did in the semi-final against Rajasthan, they were prone to fold. By far the shrewdest operators in this year's auction, they plugged the batting gap by purchasing Paul Collingwood and Owais Shah in the auction and acquiring a trio of Aussie Twenty20 specialists in big hitting David Warner, all-rounder Andrew McDonald and quick bowler Dirk Nannes.

Mumbai Indians also did shrewd business. Despite a strong bowling performance, they finished a disappointing fifth last year. They've lost Shaun Pollock but have compensated by picking up Kyle Mills at the auction and Zaheer Khan during the trading window for already signed players that ran for a month from the end of December. They've also improved the batting department with the purchases of Duminy and Ashraful as well as two more Twenty20 players who made their name in the English Twenty20 Cup: Graham Napier and Ryan McClaren. And with Tendulkar and Harbhajan likely to be available for the whole tournament this time, they are well positioned to mount a strong campaign.