Knight Riders play it smart, Supergiants go all in

When the Indian Premier League was launched in 2008, it was presented as a cocktail of cricket, glamour and a lot of bling. Over the last nine years, the tournament has turned into serious business, with profits on the line, reputation at stake - for the owners and players equally - it's the cricket that takes center stage now every single time.

And that means a lot of planning goes into procuring the best possible team at the auction every year. Mock auctions are held, considerable amount of time is spent on franchises deliberating on what other team will look for and then devising a strategy around it, behavioural spending patterns are scrutinised and then only teams arrive at players they are going to bid for.

There's hardly any shock element for the franchise anymore. So when Royal Challengers Bangalore were dealt with an unkind cut after Mitchell Starc decided to end his association with the franchise, they weren't left searching for answers at the very last moment. "It was planned. We knew what we were looking for after he pulled out. We had accounted this," the members of their team at the auction said.

There were different patterns on show in the auction in Bengaluru on February 20. Gujarat Lions made the highest bid of just one crore and saved a lot of money while Kolkata Knight Riders played the waiting game. Rising Pune Supergiants and Royal Challengers were completely the opposite. While Supergiants bought Ben Stokes for Rs 14.5 crore, Royal Challengers acquired Tymal Mills for Rs 12 crore.

Supergiants walked in to the auction with a purse of Rs 17.5 crore and by the time the marquee set of the players were sold - within the first hour of the day and with more than 340 players to go - they were left with just Rs 4 crore with them. Sanjeev Goenka, the owner, looked pretty pleased with the buy and termed Stokes as "the hero they were lacking."

"He's a complete player. He completes our squad. We have been lacking this one genre of player in our team. We have many heroes but this is the one hero we were lacking," he gushed.

"It was a very conscious strategy to go for Stokes. We are reinforcing our core, our playing XI. You'll see the rest of the strategy as it folds out during the day."

Whether the 'strategy' was played out right, or not, is a different thing but what's of note is the buys they made after Stokes. Dan Christian (1 crore), Manoj Tiwary (50 lakhs), Lockie Ferguson (50 lakhs), Jaydev Unadkat (50 lakhs), Rahul Chahar (10 lakhs), Saurabh Kumar (10 lakhs), Milind Tandon (10 lakhs) and Rahul Tripathi (10 lakhs). Having made such a big buy first up, they walked out with one just marquee player, a game-changing one. Remaining buys, of course, don't inspire the same amount of confidence that Stokes does.

Royal Challengers too had the same fate - ending with just one big buy. After Mills, they bought Aniket Choudhary (2 crore), Pawan Negi (1 crore), Billy Stanlake (30 lakhs) and Praveen Dubey (10 lakhs). One factor that does work in their favour is, of course, they have a settled core where Chris Gayle, Shane Watson, AB de Villiers, the stars of the format, and Mills take up the four overseas slots. They have the luxury of having the best names in the business with them while Supergiants don't.

And then there were the Knight Riders. They didn't place a single bid when marquee players were up for grabs - happily playing the role of quiet bystanders. When other major players came up, they weren't too eager and held their cards close to their chest. After the first round, when franchises were asked to submit the list of players they want to call back in the auction, Knight Riders gave several names.

With no bids coming for these players, they ended up with buying a number of major players at some very good rates. Having bagged Trent Boult (5 crore), they got Chris Woakes (4.2 crore), Nathan Coulter-Nile (3.5 crore), Rishi Dhawan (55 lakhs), Darren Bravo (50 lakhs), Rovman Powell (30 lakhs), Ishank Jaggi (10 lakhs), Sayan Ghosh (10 lakhs) and Sanjay Yadav (10 lakhs).

The Knight Riders' approach showed planning and experience. They had adopted the same approach last year and had walked away with Colin Munro at just 30 lakhs. "I'm glad our strategy worked," said Venky Mysore on why they didn't bid big early on. "Timing is everything. Teams are planning it all very well.

"In the first round they were unsold, which on our part was by design. We always wanted to bring them back in later. More often than not, you get these value buys. We were pleasantly surprised with Rovman going unsold. He's know as the junior Andre Russell and we were expecting teams to go after him."

AR Srikkanth, who works as an analyst for Knight Riders and is one of the crucial members of the team devising auction strategies, revealed it was a conscious effort to not go after big players. "If you compare the numbers of Chris Woakes and Ben Stokes, there's not much that separates them," he told Cricbuzz. "KKR is an outfit which depends mostly on Indian batsmen. It didn't make sense to go for someone above 10 crores, 12 crores or 14 crores and rejig your entire batting line-up to play that one player.

"Russell was a different matter and the team got used to what Russell did. Russell and Stokes cannot be compared as well. If you look at the bigger picture, it made sense to have a bowling allrounder to complement our Indian batting rather than a batsman who could bowl a few overs."

Srikkanth also acknowledged that the think-tank has spent a considerable amount of time studying other teams before forming their strategies. "There is so much unpredictability in the auction that you only plan to a certain limit. You can only have limited idea to what the other teams are looking at in terms of roles but really can't put names to those roles," he pointed out. "You really don't know how much the other team is willing to spend. Yes, we do read into their behavioural pattern when it comes to spending but that's only helpful to a certain extent. It's really hard to predict what players the other franchises will go for, and how far they will go for, but the roles, of course, can be predicted.

"We did spend a considerable amount of time on working out what the other teams will be looking for and then plan out strategy."

Whether it was the right strategy to shower all the money on Stokes and Mills, only time will tell. One thing is for sure, both Supergiants and Royal Challengers were pretty handcuffed after the first set. Knight Riders, Lions, on the other hand, played it smart and acquired some valuable assets. Which team walked out with better players? You decide.