IPL Auction Action

Right, my penchant for alliteration must be quite obvious by now. I'm a closet poet. It's my dirty little secret. Here I am, in the thick of a rather professional report, when meter and allegory and analogy and alliteration leak from a gap in the mental seam. Gotta love blogging. I can get to the point I'm trying to make, right now, or later, or not at all. Don't like it? Bollocks to you. Fine, I'll get to it now.

Just trying to record my impressions of the player auction I updated live on thehindu.com over the last couple of days. It was an interesting experience, gives you an insight into the thought process of the bidders. At least that's what tracking an event constantly is supposed to do. But I must admit some of the buys flummoxed me. Not simply from a tactical perspective, because I'm not completely up to date on the skill levels of every player who went under the hammer. But even financially, some of the purchases didn't make much sense. Badrinath, for instance. Chennai Super Kings went all out to retain him and ended up paying $800,000 for him. They really could have done without him. He had a base price tag of $100,000. Sam was very vocally unhappy about this. He was hoping Chennai would drop him when the bidding got hot, but they didn't. The teams were more keen on retaining some of the old squad than I had imagined. He would have probably cost them less if he was part of the four they were allowed to retain.

The newsmaking shocker was of course the dumping of major leaguers like Gayle, Jayasuriya, Boucher, Anderson, Ganguly, Lara. Now Lara I can understand, he's admittedly past his prime. But he's been up the creek and over the mountain, as Siddhu would've said and could give his team a wealth of experience. And Gayle, Boucher and Jayasuriya would definitely have won some matches for their side.