Published: Apr 11, 2011, 11:13 AM (IST)
Edited: Mar 19, 2014, 07:48 PM (IST)
By Vinay Anand
When the IPL player auction was in January 2011, team owners in the Indian Premier League had the opportunity to retain a maximum of four players from the previous seasons.
Capitalizing on the rule, Chennai held on to Mahendra Singh Dhoni, Suresh Raina, Murali Vijay and Albie Morkel, while Mumbai Indians locked in Sachin Tendulkar, Harbhajan Singh, Lasith Malinga and Kieron Pollard.
This is where the two teams benefited most and gave themselves a serious chance of repeating their act getting into the final – as they did in the 2010 season. A well-settled team has a much better chance than a new and unsettled one.
Rajasthan, Delhi and Bangalore have an outside chance since they retained a lesser amount of players. Shane Warne and Shane Watson will once again don the purple Rajasthan jersey, and being the two star players, they will be expected to lead the team to the IPL gold.
Delhi only retained Virender Sehwag. Sehwag is 31, and can play for another three years with his style of batting tailor-made for T20 cricket. Under his captaincy, Delhi qualified in the last four in the first two seasons. While Bangalore thought fit to just retain Virat Kohli, in the hope that he lives up to the performances he has produced over the last three seasons. And being just 21, he is the future of this team.
The teams though that could find it hard going would be Kolkata, Deccan and Punjab. All three teams did not fare well in the last three seasons in aggregate. So, they took the auction as an opportunity to start from scratch by building a new team altogether. That is not wrong by any means, as that is what the auction was all about.
But the catch here is that the teams did not see the fact that some individual players stood out for them. Although Kolkata bought Manoj Tiwary and Jaidev Unadkat yet again, they had to retain some players to bring in some familiarity within the team. They should have considered retaining Brendon McCullum, Ashok Dinda and Sourav Ganguly, especially. It will not be simple for Gautam Gambhir, the new captain of the team to lead a bunch of individuals who have never played for the franchise before because Gambhir himself was a Delhi Daredevil.
I believe that Deccan Chargers have been weakened by the auction. Players like Adam Gilchrist, Andrew Symonds and Rohit Sharma are a fair buy in T20 cricket. Instead, now what they have is a bunch of bits-and-pieces cricketers. Deccan lacks the domestic punch and even the foreign players do not seem a big threat, since Kevin Pietersen is injured and Cameron White is out of form.
Kings XI Punjab is the team which has been severely hit this time. With no Yuvraj Singh in the side, Punjab looks like a Ranji Trophy team playing T20 cricket. If not Yuvraj, they could have retained the Sri Lankan duo of Mahela Jayawardene and Kumar Sangakkara. They lost several of their star players to other franchises, who are now reaping the benefits. A team having Adam Gilchrist as their captain, with no player backing him up is a shame.
The moral of the story is that the player auction had to be done wisely by the franchises. Agreed that things may go wrong in an auction, but Mumbai and Chennai seem to have got it right by retaining their star actors first, and then looking for the supporting cast with the salary cap that they had remaining. And as a result, both the teams were able to pick a large contingent of players who might not be big names but worth a buy in T20 cricket.
So do not be astonished to see these teams perform well this season, as they are in with a huge competitive advantage.
(Vinay Anand, 17, has an uncanny eye for detail. He revers cricket – looking beyond the glamour into the heart of the game where true passion, perseverance and grit meet. To him, there is no greater joy than coming closer to the sport while exploring its intricacies through his writing and treading ahead to establish himself as a writer and presenter)
