Madness at the IPL player auction

Shane Bond's smile at training yesterday for Canterbury said it all. Photo / Getty Images

There was a delightful moment during the online coverage of the Indian Premier League's third player auction in Mumbai on Tuesday night.

For those with better things to do, the website Cricinfo ran blow-by-blow coverage of the eight franchises haggling over players for the next edition of the Twenty20 competition, starting in March.

The website's man on the spot was breathlessly tapping out the developments, minute-by-minute as rival franchises upped the stakes as they scrapped over a particular player.

An entry at 1.41pm (Mumbai time) reads: "Well, that's it, it's all over."

But wait, at 1.42pm came the breathless: "Hang on ... Modi's given someone two minutes for something."

You could picture a hush fall over the auction room as the IPL's puppetmaster Lalit Modi, decider of all things IPL, delivered news around the room as if fates of nations depended on it.

Keeping tabs on it all was a hoot, watching players' value to the sport's most financially lucrative game be decided by assorted concrete magnates, Bollywood stars, booze barons, media groups and medicine manufacturers.

All you need to know about the madness of the modern game is that a bloke called Kieron Pollard, along with New Zealand's supreme speedster Shane Bond, on their own broke the auction ceiling per franchise of US$750,000 ($1 million) in being picked up by Mumbai Indians and Kolkata Knight Riders respectively.

Indeed they cost their franchises more, as with more than one buyer in each contest the ante was raised in a follow-up silent bid. The franchise which wrote the larger number on a scrap of paper handed to Modi got their man. Mumbai's successful silent bid for Pollard was yesterday put at an eye-watering US$2.5 million.

Bond you can understand. A proven matchwinner who, since retiring from tests shortly before Christmas, is available for all but the first two of the 14 round robin games, he was always going to be a sought-after item.

Pollard was a hot-tempered allrounder of distinctly average output in New Zealand with the West Indies last summer. A dressing room window at Wellington's Westpac Stadium took such a dislike after his dismissal in an ODI that it smashed itself on the end of his bat.

But he prospered at the Champions League for Trinidad and Tobago late last year, has helped South Australia to the final of their domestic Twenty20 this weekend - and therefore into this year's Champions League - and, hey presto, he's the man.

Even so, if correct his final IPL figure is Monopoly money. He's hardly among the world's top flight cricketers but it doesn't matter. It's all about the moment and Pollard, you have to say, has shown impeccable timing.

Players are paid on a pro rata basis. So Bond's whack per game for Kolkata will be about US$53,000. He will miss out on around US$106,000 through New Zealand ODI commitments against Australia, which cut across the start of the IPL, but then rake in about US$640,000 if he plays the remainder of the round robin.

It didn't take long for the fur to start flying yesterday. Pakistan are furious that their 11 players in the auction attracted a combined zero bids. The auction had 67 players vying for 13 vacancies (11 of which were filled) and to be in the auction players had to have had interest expressed in them by at least one franchise.

Pakistan smell a rat. They were withdrawn from last year's auction by their Government over security concerns. Since then they have become world Twenty20 champions, and certainly possess some champions in the shortest form of the game.

Now they sniff a tit-for-tat engineered by the IPL as payback for that withdrawal.

Power-hitting allrounder Shahid Afridi, who would have no trouble finding a use for a can of petrol at a fire, denounced it as an insult. "The IPL and India have made fun of us and our country," he said, demonstrating that his diplomatic skills are not on a par with his pyrotechnic talents with a bat in his hands.

Keep an eye out for the date of the 2011 auction. All contracts expire on December 31. It's a fresh canvas, or as cricket people are fond of saying these days, a rapidly changing landscape. Right now, as Pollard's signing has demonstrated, anything is possible.