IPL auction: Present form, future potential outbid past records

BANGALORE - If cricket is a game of glorious uncertainties, building a team for its shortest version cannot be any better. That is what the bidding here for players for the fourth edition of the Indian Premier League indicated Saturday.

Big names of cricket with impressive records to their names found no buyers even at the base price of $400,000 each when the bidders’ combined wad was a whopping $75 million.

India’s most successful captain and star of limited-overs game Sourav Ganguly and two big names of West Indies cricket Brian Lara and Chris Gayle as well as the world learnt the stark lesson of what IPL is all about — present form and potential, not reputation and records under one’s kitty. The minimum price for all the three was $400,000.

The players bought Saturday and Sunday by ten franchisees will be with them for two years, their tenure extendable by one year.

The 2011 IPL T20 begins in April.

So if IPL is dismissed by cricket ‘purists’ as nothing more than ‘it is all about money, honey’, the bidders may well retort ‘big money bets on records to be made, not past figures, honey’.