Cricket: IPL cattle auction is fine one year but repugnant the next

Colin Munro, West Indies tour of New Zealand. Photo / Photosport

On February 20, 2008, New Zealand's best cricketers were pleasantly exhausted, having tied England — 340 runs apiece, Jamie How run out on the penultimate ball for 139 — in a one-day international for the ages at McLean Park in Napier.

Settling down to pizzas and beer at the Shoreline Motel on Marine Parade, the players pulled some outdoor lounges together and gathered around a couple of laptops to watch the inaugural IPL player auction.

Although there were only four players involved, the rest of the team were keen to see the fate of teammates and Brendon McCullum, Jacob Oram, Daniel Vettori and Scott Styris, who were up for auction along with Stephen Fleming, whose ODI career had already ended.

Right from the start, weirdness was in vogue. Ricky Ponting, a bona fide genius who had sprinkled stardust on the first T20 international by scoring 98 not out from 55 balls against New Zealand, went for US$450,000, while inferior teammates Andrew Symonds and David Hussey went for $1.35 million and $625,000 respectively.

In his newspaper column, Ponting admitted the apparent lack of logic left him dumbfounded. He wondered if accusing Indian hero Harbhajan Singh of racism had affected his price, but then remembered Symonds was at the forefront of that conflict, too.

Lalit Modi, then commissioner of the IPL and no stranger to controversy or courtrooms, would later explain away the anomalies: "Some players have gone surprisingly low, some players have gone surprisingly very, very high. The rationale is not for me to judge, it's for the team owners to judge."

In other words, it was just capitalism at work: you are worth what the market is prepared to pay.

The New Zealanders did well that night — mostly.

McCullum went for $700,000, Oram for $650,000, Vettori for $625,000 and Fleming $350,000. The only downer was Styris, reputed to like a dollar more than most, going to the now defunct Deccan Chargers for his reserve price of $175,000.

And what was New Zealand's reaction to this craven excess, to cricket's modern take on the saleyards? Well, it was extremely positive actually.

The players, apart from Styris perhaps, were delighted, and the chief executive of New Zealand Cricket was positively giddy.

"The auction was a watershed night for cricket and, I believe, for New Zealand in particular," said Justin Vaughan. The IPL, in all its gaudy glory, was held in such esteem by NZC that it allowed its players, who were staunchly backed by their association boss Heath Mills, to miss the first two weeks of a tour to England in order to maximise their pro rata payments.

To those of us watching from a distance, the auction always felt repugnant, yet strangely compelling. It has made a few New Zealanders rich but this year was bit of a fizzer.

McCullum remains New Zealand's most marketable T20 player but at $770,000 he is a long way from the stratosphere occupied by the likes of bad boy Ben Stokes ($2.7m) and bad sledger Mitchell Starc ($2m).

Colin Munro, ranked the world's best T20 batsman, appeared to be grossly undervalued at $406,000, while recent No1-bowler Ish Sodhi and the talented but enigmatic Martin Guptill weren't valued at all.

"I think the whole system is archaic and deeply humiliating for the players, who are paraded like cattle for all the world to see," Mills told the Herald .

And he's right in many respects, but most of us have known this for a decade.

Shame it took a lousy auction for New Zealand to make some noise about it.