The Sports-India Community

prasen9 wrote: This is such a hotchpotch.

Absolutely This is like gully cricket -- rules are made as when required and an existing rule will be  assigned elasticity coefficients to fit a need and so on.

All other players should be free to sign up with any team they like.  If there are multiple suitors, then the player can just get multiple offers and sign up.  But no, the control freaks in the IPL have to then sign up the player and then auction off the player to the teams.

The ICL has got real opportunity if they can do this well.  They should spend well in bill-boards in the cities and get some media people to do some publicity.  They should open franchises in the so-called smaller cities like Ahmedabad, Pune, Kanpur, and Surat.  Maybe Lucknow, Nagpur, Patna, and Indore then.  With some money spent in publicity initially, these cities will accept the ICL teams as their own.  Get them to be owned by some professional people and run a decent show.  The IPL is only once a year for a moth or 1.5 months.  There will be people to watch Brian Lara, Inzamam and Shane Bond.  However, the way the ICL is being run is not giving much hope either.  Run it on prime-time on Zee.

I guess that the 4 under 22 players need not belong to ones local area. All you need is 4 under-22 players and 4 local area players.

Why wouldn't there be a rush in acquiring these player ?

As far as IPL franchises are concerned, BCCI had fixed a limit of 8 for 1st year, but had not announced any particular city names. The bid that these owners made for the teams were (City, amount). Top 8 bid won, thereby giving us 8 cities. Sahara India had bid for a Lucknow franchise and some other company had bid for an Ahmedabad franchise, but both bids were apparently less than the Jaipur bid.

puneets wrote: Why wouldn't there be a rush in acquiring these player ?

There would be if there is an under-22 player worth his or her salt who has not been acquired.  What I was saying is this.  Most teams have basically 1-2 spots to fill in the XI. For example, Pujara, Rahane, Kaul, Ravi Teja, A Mukund, Karan Sharma, Sangwan, Monish Parmar, Virat Kohli, and a few other U-22 players who can be picked up for another zone should be hotly pursued by teams who have weak zones behind them.  However, someone like S. Tiwary will just bring up the numbers for the first 1-2 years at least for most teams.  Unless, there is something great about S. Tiwary that I am completely missing.  Out of 22 players in a team the last 4-5 will be fillers anyway and not play.  So, there should not be much rush to get these fillers.  I would certainly hope that the Kolkata team pursue Pujara heavily to get him signed for the other remaining batsman's spot, but will S. Tiwary help that much?

prasen - Most teams will have 16 players. Some teams already have 6-7 foreign players (8 is the limit). And out of these 7-8, only 4 are allowed to play in a game. That opens up opportunity for these under-22 players to figure in almost every game.

puneets wrote: prasen - Most teams will have 16 players. Some teams already have 6-7 foreign players (8 is the limit). And out of these 7-8, only 4 are allowed to play in a game. That opens up opportunity for these under-22 players to figure in almost every game.

Let us see.  There are 18 players outside these U-22 players.  If you deduct 4 foreign players, there are 18, out of which 11 will play, 7 will sit.  Most teams will play 4 foreign players, 4 Indian team players.  Then, of the 3 left, if they are from a strong zone, all will be zonal players.  Maybe 1 U-22 player will play per game per team.  Most will be in the reserves unless the zone is weak.  But, I was mainly baffled why they are running after Saurabh Tiwary instead of the other more established U-22 players.  The S.Tiwary's are merely going to be  numbers in the team.

prasen wrote:There are 18 players outside these U-22 players.  If you deduct 4 foreign players, there are 18, out of which 11 will play, 7 will sit.  Most teams will play 4 foreign players, 4 Indian team players.  Then, of the 3 left, if they are from a strong zone, all will be zonal players.

I'm a bit confused by this.
Aren't there supposed to be 16 players (including the 4 under-22 players) in each team ?

As usual you are right, Puneet.  Sorry!  Somehow I thought there would be 22 players and that was the reason why I did not see why they wanted to stash these players.  So, now there will be 5 players sitting out.  For teams having, say, 7 foreigners, 3 will sit out.  That means you can stash only 2 U-22 player and the other 2 will play.  Makes more sense to me.  But the problem also is that the team also has to have 4 players from the catchment area.

Okay, that means Ishant can be double-dipped, i.e., counted as an U-22 and that is why his price increased more --- apart from the fact that he is the most promising U-22 player.

For example, the Kolkata team has 11 players and needs 5 more.  I do not know if they are counting Ganguly to be from the catchment area.  Then, they need 3 more catchment players and 3 more U-22 players.  So then they must have one player who is both catchment and U-22.

-pm

As is mostly the case with BCCI, don't be surprised if they come up with some new rule overnight.

I believe that 16 is not the upper limit, but the lower limit. So your scenario of having 22 players could as well be true

I really give up.  Now the analysis will again be different.  As everyone here but BCCI understands, having a required 4 catchment players and required 4 U-22 players is useless unless you have a upper limit to the number of players in the team.  I remain confused.  You can just choose the best team and stash some garbage players to satisfy the U-22 and catchment players if there is no upper limit.

To add to it, it seems that you do not have exclusive or first rights to zonal players.  That is good.

Retiring players will have to wait two years it seems:

Retiring players in IPL

I see the ICL bosses breaking out into a smile.  They will welcome these players with open arms.

That looks like old news (Dec '07). Gilchrist and Pollock are already in IPL within weeks of their retirements. BCCI will say one thing and do the exact opposite next day.

Looks like there's a mad scramble for the local and under-22 players now.
After big guns, IPL teams shop for youngsters

And, BCCI clarifies that U-19 players have to play for their catchment areas for fixed fees:

U-19 in IPL
One year contract

So, the Saurabh Tiwaris' contracts signed will be null and void.  If they had signed a contract for a much larger money, will they go to court to enforce it?  I guess he will not want to be in the bad books for BCCI and thus will not be an issue.

But, that leaves the over-19 under-22 players who can still play for any area and not only their catchment areas.  These are the players who should be in demand.

puneets wrote: Top 8 bid won, thereby giving us 8 cities. Sahara India had bid for a Lucknow franchise and some other company had bid for an Ahmedabad franchise, but both bids were apparently less than the Jaipur bid.

"Apparently" perhaps is the key word.  Coupled with the fact that Lalit Modi is the marketing guy in the BCCI and head honcho of Rajasthan cricket, one wonders how Jaipur knew exactly how much to bid to move above Ahmedabad .... Maybe a coincidence, but, just wondering.