Muscat, Feb 11
It will be a day when lives will change overnight, a day when fortunes will skyrocket on certain players and provide a golden launchpad for hitherto lesser known players as the mega Indian Premier League 2022 auction kicks off today at the ITC Royal Gardenia in Bangalore.
A total of 590 players comprising 370 Indian players and 220 overseas players will go under the hammer in the two day auction to be conducted by Hugh Edmeades.
With the IPL expanding to a 10-team event with the inclusion of two new franchises from Ahmedabad and Lucknow, who are now named Gujarat Titans and Lucknow Super Giants, the pool has naturally widened making for a greatly interesting and intriguing auction.
The auction will open with a total of ten players, both Indian and foreign, who have been set aside as marquee players.
The likes of R Ashwin, Shreyas Iyer, Trent Boult, Pat Cummins, Shikhar Dhawan, Quinton de Kock etc are part of the list and are likely to be lapped up by franchises for huge sums of money.
The marquee set will be followed by a full round of capped players based on their specialisation such as batters, allrounders, wicketkeeper-batters, fast bowlers and spin bowlers before moving on to uncapped players.
IPL has divided the auction pool into 62 sets based on specialisation including the marquee set of players. Meanwhile, the capped and uncapped players will be alternated after a few sets.
There will be a total of 229 capped players, 354 uncapped players and seven players from Associate teams in the fray vying to be picked up by franchises.
On the first day of the auction, 161 players will be up for bidding while the second day will see an accelerated bidding process.
The accelerated process as the name suggests is used to quicken up the auction process with the franchises given the option to nominate players they are interested in from the remaining pool. This process will happen on Sunday and can continue further if any franchise wants to nominate any player unpresented/unsold until then.
No Right to Match Cards
The IPL has done away with the Right to Match Cards which was there in the last big auction in 2018.
The probable reason could be that the IPL wants the two new franchises to have the best opportunity to pick up a strong group of players for their squads.
Each team needs to have a minimum of 18 players and can have a maximum of 25 players in their squads post the auction. For this to happen, they will need to spend a minimum of INR 67.5 crore (USD 9 million approx) out of their total purse of INR 90 crore (USD 12 million approx).
Also, each team can have a maximum of eight overseas players in their squad.
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