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| Making sense of bidding in Indian Premier League, IPL |
| Thursday, February 21, 2008 |
A new chapter was written in Indian and World cricket yesterday as millions of peoples mostly in India watched with anticipation the developments of bidding and arguing the mindboggling price set for some players and some ridiculously low price for some of the greats of the game.
Cricket has always attracted huge amount of money in India but yesterday even these levels were breached. This is the just the beginning of the IPL and only one can imagine the kind of money that will pour for cricketers post IPL.
The players yesterday turned from the good and great to commodities that were being bided by the franchises and for once the players would have not mind anyone putting a price tag on them. There were huge surprises installed in the bidding and the biggest one came when
Australian captain Ricky Ponting and hard hitting opening batsmen Matthew Hayden went for 400,000 USD and 375,000 USD respectively compared to whopping 1.35 Million USD for Australian all rounder Andrew Symonds. Just only few days back Andrew Symonds was involved in controversy with Indian spin bowler Harbhajan Singh and just when it seemed that every Australians cricketers brand value got lower in India after that came the announcement of this bid by Hyderabad team. Even Andrew Symonds bugbear, Harbhajan Singh went home with hefty 850,000 USD nearly twice the amount for his spin partner and Test captain Anil Kumble.
Just as the news came pouring in about the bidding rounds the purist of the game went ballistic. How could MS Dhoni get more than Adam Gilchrist and Mark Boucher combined? How could Yusuf Pathan command 25,000 USD more than Shane Warne? How could David Hussey and Cameroon White get more money than Ricky Ponting and Michael Hussey? Several questions were raised but franchises had done their planning based on T20 skills, the age factor, the availability and most importantly marketability of the players.
If we have a close look at the bidding process then we will find that all rounder’s commanded most interest from all the franchises and they were amongst the highest paid cricketers. The non availability of Australian and Pakistani players impacted their bidding prices enormously. Controversy seemed to have played well to two cricketers for sure. Andrew Symonds and Harbhajan Singh emerged as front runners in there category of players. And lastly brand value played huge rule in determining MS Dhoni as undisputed leader of the pack and in Football sense he can be termed as David Beckham of cricket.
What remains to be seen is that will IPL invite the same passion as the India-Pakistan or Australia-England game arises in fans. Changing the loyalty from ones country to city will take long time but as it is said that every success has small beginning. |
posted by Sid @ 12:28 PM  |
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Name: Sid
Home: Chandigarh, India
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