In a post yesterday, I’d predicted that the teams would’ve met up beforehand in order to “cut the IPL melon” among themselves and not indulge in cut-throat competition at the bidding. Given what happened yesterday, it seems like somone broke this agreement and then everyone went mad.
One thing you’ll quickly observe when you team is that the “displacement” is very high. Apart from Gambhir and veterans Kumble and Laxman, most of the people who were in the open pool have gone to “non-home” teams. I’m not talking about people like Sreesanth or Dhoni or any of the UP guys here since they don’t have a “natural home”.
I wanted to draw a graph for this, but am too lazy so will just write it down. The columns are name, home team, actual team
Robin Uthappa –> Bangalore –> Mumbai
Manoj Tiwary –> Calcutta –> Delhi
Harbhajan Singh –> Mohali –> Mumbai
Rohit Sharma –> Mumbai –> Hyderabad
Ishant Sharma –> Delhi –> Calcultta
Dinesh Karthik –> Madras –> Delhi
And then you have Zaheer Khan and Agarkar and Powar and just about everyone else.
The BCCI has put a rule that there should be at least 4 “local” guys and 4 under-22 guys in each squad and teams seem to have not made any effort to pick the “local” guys from the international pool itself. There is also a rule that there shouln’t be more than 4 playres in the playing XI from abroad. it also appears as if some teams didn’t really remember this particular rule when the bidding happened. I would’ve surely expected more foreign players to be left unbid after yesterday.
And yeah, given the composition of the team, we can expect the Bangalore pitch to be dug up soon.