The IPL player auctions

I woke up in the middle of the night... and with nothing better to do, ended up at cricinfo.

Now, I've taken it upon myself to follow the fortunes of the Chennai team. Yeah, I'm jingoistic! :P

Looks like the we've landed Murali and Matthew Hayden. Two of my all-time favorites. And surprisingly enough, a $1.5 mill Dhoni. Stephen Fleming. And a bunch of fairly useless players.

I do think Dhoni is a very gutsy player. But $1.5 mill?

Just to get a sense of what else $1.5 mill could have bought us:

Shane Warne (US$ 450,000)
Anil Kumble (US$ 500,000)
Adam Gilchrist (US$ 700,000)
Mahela Jayawardene (US$ 475,000)
Kumar Sangakkara (US$ 700,000)
Ricky Ponting (US$ 400,000) - (If Punter travels to Pakistan, he doesn't get to play at all... that explains this number, somewhat.)
Kamran Akmal (US$ 150,000)

At first glance, I think I like the way most of the other teams look. :( Chennai has three stars, and then some.

Moving on, I think the bidding process itself is quite interesting. Auctions are places where value is decided by what something is worth to the second highest bidder.

This auction becomes somewhat more interesting because there are caps. Every team has a cap on how much it can spend in total. So what they're looking at is to form a good team within that amount. When you already have five batsmen, someone like Shahid Afridi becomes more attractive than Ricky Ponting.

The other objectives are quite obvious too... The amount spent is incomplete without countering in expected payback: Financially and otherwise.

This post is incomplete. I don't think I've completely digested what's happening. But this does seem like fun stuff.