Advertisement

Secrets of the IPL auction revealed: How Rajasthan Royals formed their 2021 squad

Rajasthan Royals prepare for season. - RAJASTHAN ROYALS
Rajasthan Royals prepare for season. - RAJASTHAN ROYALS

In Talegaon, a small village near Nagpur, on February 2nd, around 40 Indian players arrived in the hope of securing the golden ticket: a place in the IPL.

To prepare for this year’s auction, when they attempted to improve upon a side that finished bottom in 2020, Rajasthan Royals organised player trials for young Indian talent. On a custom-built facility that Rajasthan have owned since 2018, complete with indoor nets and a full-sized ground outside, the players had a chance to advance their claims to IPL selection.

Rajasthan don’t think that the traditional way of judging players in the nets - watching over them for several hours - is particularly useful. Instead, players are trialled under match scenarios designed to test them under high pressure - bowling for 12 balls while defending a particular target, say - to try and replicate the demands of Twenty20. All the while they are watched by Zubin Bharucha, the franchise’s strategy, development and performance director. In Talegaon, players also undergo medical tests to ascertain their fitness, and the management observes players’ personalities to get a sense of how they could fit into the team environment.

This year, Chetan Sakariya, a left-arm pace bowler who recently turned 23 but has never been involved in the IPL, was among those invited to Talegaon. Sakariya impressed Rajasthan’s coaches with his skills and temperament under pressure. The team management intended to reward him come auction day.

Letting Steve Smith go

In the 2020 IPL, Rajasthan fielded an enviable quartet of overseas players: the England trio Jos Buttler, Ben Stokes and Jofra Archer, and Steve Smith, who captained the side. So why did all this talent only secure six wins from 14 games?

In the Royals’ reviews after the tournament, in person and more often over Zoom, the team management - led by director of cricket Kumar Sangakkara, owner Manoj Badale, chief operating officer Jake McCrum and Bharucha - identified a very simple answer. Rajasthan’s bowling, even with Archer outstanding, wasn’t good enough. Studying the leading sides in the competition, including the finalists Mumbai Indians and Delhi Capitals, Rajasthan came to the belief that their problem wasn’t the quality of their overseas players. Instead, it was the balance of their overseas players: the best IPL teams tend to have two overseas quick bowlers, because the supply of Indian quicks is relatively less impressive.

“You look at all the teams that have been successful in the IPL and they generally have two overseas seamers. We had the gap in death bowling. That was probably the area we underperformed most,” McCrum explained. “Steve wouldn't bring that balance to the side when you've got Buttler and Stokes.”

Around Christmas, Smith was told that he was being released. So were seven other players, including England’s Tom Curran. That left Rajashtan up to 38 crore left to spend on players, almost half the total salary cap of 85 crore (£8.75million) for each side.

Rajasthan Royals player Ben Stokes during the practice session ahead the IPL match against Kings XI Punjab at Sawai Mansingh Stadium in Jaipur, Rajasthan, India, on Sunday, March 24,2019. - GETTY IMAGES
Rajasthan Royals player Ben Stokes during the practice session ahead the IPL match against Kings XI Punjab at Sawai Mansingh Stadium in Jaipur, Rajasthan, India, on Sunday, March 24,2019. - GETTY IMAGES

Compiling a hit list - and second-guessing their opponents

Identifying which players to release was merely the start of Rajasthan’s auction preparations. The next task was to figure out who to replace them.

To find the answer, Rajashtan combine scouting methods new and old. Through their scouting network, and the trials in Talegaon, Rajasthan see all potential targets in person as much as possible. They supplement this information with data, working with the analytics company CricViz. Forensic analysis of unheralded Indian players is especially important.

Before the auction, McCrum explained which players the Royals were targeting. They wanted two overseas seamers - one to bowl at the death, and one to offer a left-arm option; an Indian batsman; two Indian seamers, with one a left-armer; a back-up overseas batsman; and an Indian off spinner.

For each category, Rajasthan had a distinct hierarchy. But the complications were manifold. Which players would their opponents want? How would the price paid for one player impact how much cash the Royals had left? And how much could the lots - when the names of players were drawn out - impact the Royals’ plans?

To best-equip themselves, Rajasthan’s analysts attempt to work out exactly which type of players every other team would try and recruit to allow them to understand the dynamics of the auction room.

Rajasthan’s next step was assigning maximum prices to each player. But even this came with one caveat: if more money was saved signing one player for less than the Royals were happy to pay, it would free up funds that could be allowed to go above the agreed price for another player. For Rajasthan, the lowest budget IPL franchise, there is another consideration: shareholders tend not to look kindly upon money spent on players who do not play, necessitating extra discipline in spending on backup overseas players.

The Royals knew that their main ambition for the auction - to improve their overseas pace bowling - was one shared by most other sides. The 2021 auction was a ‘small auction’, with most players retained - so the supply of viable overseas quick bowlers would be small, driving up the prices further.

Chris Morris, the South African bowling allrounder, was identified as the primary pace bowling target. If they could not secure Morris, the Royals would try to recruit Jhye Richardson or Adam Milne as an alternative frontline seamer. For their second overseas quick - who would only expect to play in the event of injury or a particularly favourable match-up - the Royals’s first-choice target was Bangladesh’s left-armer Mustafizur Rahman; Rajasthan established with the Bangladesh Cricket Board that Mustafizur would be available for the first 12 matches. Recruiting Milne as the extra overseas quick was also an attractive option; if neither Mustafizur nor Milne were available, Australia’s Riley Meredith and the West Indies’s Obed McCoy were alternatives.

Shivam Dube, the batting allrounder who has represented India in limited-overs cricket, was the Royals’s first-choice target in the domestic batting slot. Sakariya’s performances in Talegaon elevated his credentials as an Indian quick, while KC Cariappa - who also attended the trials - was the Royals’s first-choice Indian off spinner.

As Rajasthan finalised their plans, they conducted around 15 mock auctions in the ten days before the auction. As far as possible, they tried to prepare for every eventuality. The mock-auctions included ‘stress scenarios’, with rivals bidding particularly aggressively for their targets.

In these preparations, Rajasthan devised a decision tree analysis system using computer software. Essentially, this aims to condense all their information on the auction into as digestible a system as possible, which McCrum constantly referred back to during the auction. The system is updated in real-time; each player lot provides new information about how the rest of the auction might unfold. For instance, the analysis showed that Punjab Kings needed an allrounder, and if they didn’t bid for Shivam Dube they were likely to chase Shahrukh Khan; as it transpired, Punjab didn’t bid for Dube and recruited Khan.

Part of the rationale for identifying other teams’ targets is to try to push up the prices of players they do not particularly want, in order to leave rival teams with less cash to spend. Given the price he was expected to command, Glenn Maxwell was not a particular target this year, but the Royals planned to make several bids for him early to drive up his price.

Building a new team

On the morning of February 18 in Chennai, McCrum woke up at 7am to do a Covid-19 test. Understandably, he had had a “restless” night: it was the day of the IPL auction.

Naturally, Covid-19 brought another complication to the auction. Badale and Sangakkara were both unable to travel to India; instead, they were in constant communication with McCrum over WhatsApp and phone. McCrum sat on Rajasthan’s auction table, alongside the chief executive Mike Fordham, the chairman Ranjit Barthakur, the team analyst Panish Shetty and Bharucha.

In the cauldron of the auction room, McCrum constantly returned to his iPad, which contained the decision tree, which was constantly updated after each player was sold. “Our analysts were tracking who everyone else was buying, where they were spending their money, who they were bidding on who they weren't bidding on, and how that differed from our various scenarios.” In this small auction, with relatively few targets, Rajasthan’s auction would be defined early, with both their two main targets - Morris and Dube - in the second lot of the day.

For players, the luck of the lots in the auction is crucial; generally, it is better for a player’s name to be read out earlier than players with similar attributes. As he was classed an allrounder, it was Morris’s good fortune to be up for auction before other overseas quicks.

“If we missed him we were going to have to be spending significant fund on our number two or three,” McCrum explained. As such, the Royals set a steep price for which they were prepared to pay for Morris - 16 crore.

As the bidding for Morris became more fierce - Mumbai Indians and Royal Challengers Bangalore initially tussled for the player before the bidding came down to the Royals against Punjab - McCrum looked for clues about how far Punjab were prepared to go. Preity Zinta, Punjab’s co-owner, became increasingly tense.

“We could see that Preity was texting on her phone to, I don't know, analysts or other owners. They were getting sort of more and more agitated around it. And then she put the headphones in to start speaking on the phone to them. We knew there were at their limit.”

At this point, the Royals decided to relax their initial limits on Morris, convinced this was less of a risk because they had already secured Dube, their other main price, for less than they were prepared to pay. “We felt potentially 16 was our max going in, we did that extra one to 16.25. Sometimes you need to go one extra padel to win a player. And we saw that might be enough to win it. By seeing that progression it gave us an insight that we were close and it was worth going one more.”

For 16.25 crore (£1.7 million) Morris returned to Rajasthan - and became the most expensive auction signing in history. Morris, essentially, was a beneficiary of basic supply and demand: he might not be one of the very best T20 players in the world, but his skills - a combination of death bowling prowess, being able to bowl in all phases of the innings and lower-order hitting - are among the most coveted. That Kyle Jamieson, a similar cricketer who has never played in the IPL, was later sold for 15 crore emphasised the point.

Sydney Thunder's Chris Morris hits the winning runs during the Big Bash League match between the Sydney Thunder and the Perth Scorchers at Sydney Showgrounds Stadium on January 26, 2020 in Sydney, Australia. - GETTY IMAGES
Sydney Thunder's Chris Morris hits the winning runs during the Big Bash League match between the Sydney Thunder and the Perth Scorchers at Sydney Showgrounds Stadium on January 26, 2020 in Sydney, Australia. - GETTY IMAGES

While Morris was the beneficiary of the luck of the lots, the opposite was true for Milne. Rajasthan bid up to 2.2 crore for the New Zealander before Mumbai Indians secured him for 3.2 crore. “If Kings had bid one more we'd have bid for Milne - he'd probably have ended up getting another £500,000,” McCrum said. “But he didn't and Mumbai got a very good player at a good value. I think Milne was an absolute bargain.”

Instead of Milne, the Royals signed Mustafizur as their second overseas player, picking him up for his base price of 1 crore. The lower cost makes his position in the squad easier to justify should he play little. “If you bid Milne up to seven [crore] and he doesn't play any of the games, your shareholders are going to ask you why have you invested a million dollars in someone who's not playing.” Yet with Archer out for the start of the tournament, Milne would have offered closer to a like-for-like replacement.

For three of the eight players that the Royals signed their trips to Talegaon were the precursor to winning IPL contracts. Satakaria fetched a life-changing 1.2 crore and is poised to play a crucial role this season; Kuldip Yadav and KC Cariappa were also signed.

McCrum’s pre-auction target list attests to how - unusually - the auction panned out largely in accordance with Rajasthan’s plans. “We managed to get every one of our targets, and overall we ended up spending less than we had budgeted for it so we were delighted to be honest. Yes, Chris Morris got pushed to our very limit. And it was our last bid at that stage. But if you then look at who else was acquired at what prices, and the overall squad we've built at the value we've built it, we're very happy to have the 24 players we do and saving $1.8 million.”

So Rajasthan have, essentially, started 2021 with the squad they hoped for. Now, it’s over to the players.