Behind the scenes at the IPL auction with Rajasthan Royals

Exclusive: For the last seven months, the Royals have been crunching numbers, modelling outcomes and scouring the world for potential recruits ahead of an auction of infinite possibilities, writes Jonathan Liew

The Royals put in countless hours of work for this year's auction (AP)

“One hundred bid. One hundred lakh is the bid.”

From a back table at the Marriott Hotel and Spa in Jaipur, a single wooden paddle is raised, emblazoned with the logo of the Rajasthan Royals. Like the other seven franchises in the Indian Premier League, Rajasthan are busy assembling their squad for the 2019 season at the annual player auction.

On the table in front of them are arrayed the customary auction-day paraphernalia: two laptop computers, notebooks, stacks of data printouts, used coffee cups. There are five men sitting around the table, along with a senior analyst on the end of a phone in Chennai. For the last seven months, since the 2018 season ended, they’ve been crunching numbers, modelling outcomes, scouring the world for potential recruits. As a result of all this, they’ve identified the exciting West Indian Oshane Thomas as a potential target. But they’re not alone.

Two tables away, the management team of Kings XI Punjab are deep in discussion, deciding whether to counter Rajasthan’s bid of 110 lakhs – about £120,000 – with one of their own.

“One hundred and ten here with the Royals,” announces the auctioneer Hugh Edmeades, a former art auctioneer at Christie’s. “At 110, selling…”

One final glance at the Kings XI table. They’re shaking their heads.

“...To the Rajasthan Royals. The Rajasthan Royals will take Oshane Thomas. Sold to you, sir.”

21-year-old Oshane Thomas was sold for £120,000 (Getty)

And so in the time it takes a hammer to strike, the life of a 21-year-old fast bowler has changed forever. Thomas is tall, powerful, and seriously quick: over 93mph on the West Indies’ recent white-ball tour of India. But he’s never played in the IPL before. Until earlier this year, he’d never even played outside the Caribbean before.

Yet many months before Thomas pitches up to his first training session, Rajasthan will already have known virtually everything there is to know about him. His most common areas. His record against left-handers, against right-handers. Over the wicket, round the wicket. With the new ball and at the death. How he reacts under pressure. What he’s like as a character. His action will have been subjected to microscopic video analysis, his fitness record interrogated.

Multiply the case of Thomas by hundreds, or even thousands, and you’ll get some idea of the extraordinary complexity of an IPL auction. The Royals granted exclusive access to The Independent ahead of this year’s auction, allowing an unrivalled insight into a process that for all its finite numbers – eight franchises, a maximum of 25 players per franchise, a salary cap of £9.2m – offers almost bafflingly infinite possibilities.

First of all, predictably enough, comes the research. The Royals, as one of the smaller franchises in the IPL firmament, have always been somewhat ahead of the curve on this. A decade ago, when the competition first started, they quickly gained a reputation for the sharpness of their statistical analysis. Shunning the marquee Indian players in favour of smart auction bargains like Yusuf Pathan, Shane Watson and an untried teenager called Ravindra Jadeja, the Royals won the inaugural event despite having the lowest operating budget.

“Eight or nine years ago, we were seen as the Moneyball team, but others have caught up,” says Jake Lush McCrum, the team’s general manager. A former strategic advisor with a background in venture capital, McCrum’s job is to find value in the market. These days, given the spellbinding sums of money involved and the increasing professionalism of T20 franchise cricket, finding an edge is that much tougher.

Indian international Ravindra Jadeja was a little known prospect when purchased by the Royals in 2008 (Getty)

But there are still bargains out there to be found. “Last year we bought Shreyas Gopal for 20 lakh [£22,500], who ended up being one of being the best bowlers in the competition,” McCrum says. “Then you get someone like Krishnappa Gowtham, who we bought for 6.4 crores [£720,000], and I can tell you: social media were ripping us to shreds that day. He ended up having the highest strike rate in the IPL, and won us two or three matches outright.”

The process of identifying players begins early, and in more senses than one. For months in advance of the auction, the Royals will be accumulating data on potential signings with the help of advanced software. “Any T20 match player anywhere in the world, we log it,” says Zubin Bharucha, the former Surrey batsman and now the Royals’ head of cricket. “Whether it’s in Afghanistan or England, we can see the footage within – literally – five minutes of the match being played.” Domestically, scouts will be sent all over India, tracking players from as young as under-15 level, in the hope of unearthing the next T20 superstar.

But as pivotal as knowing what data to collect is what data to ignore, and when to ignore it. Batting and bowling averages, the cornerstone of cricket statistics for a century and a half, are largely irrelevant in T20, and often actively misleading. Instead, the Royals will look at more niche metrics: balls per dot, balls per six. The latter measure is what drew them to Lancashire’s Liam Livingstone, currently overlooked by England by who in this year’s Vitality Blast hit a six every eight balls. Of all the batsmen to face at least 150 balls in this year’s competition, nobody cleared the ropes more often.

Next comes the eye test. Data comes with its own caveats: how do you rate a six off Mitchell Johnson at Brisbane, with its big boundaries and bouncy wickets, against a six off some part-time club spinner in the Bangladesh Premier League? So video analysis will play a part, as well as – for domestic players – the organised trial, where a young batsman may be given as few as six balls and told to score as many as they can.

With the big marquee signings, where the risk-reward is at its peak, teams will target a specific player for a very specific role. This is often why people get surprised when a big overseas player goes unsold – as happened to Brendon McCullum, Alex Hales, Dale Steyn and many others this year. With a maximum of eight overseas players in each squad and four in the starting XI, these signings need to be thought out in painstaking detail.

The Royals forked out £1.4 million for Ben Stokes last year (Getty)

Last year, for example, the Royals raised plenty of eyebrows by forking out £1.4 million for Ben Stokes. The reasoning behind the move, however, was highly intricate. “We call players like Ben Stokes an ‘enabler’,” argues Bharucha. “You don’t pay $2 million for somebody because he’s going to win you every game every day. That doesn’t happen.

“But find me another guy in world cricket who can bowl four overs in a T20 game and potentially bat in the first six overs. They are very few and far between. So we can play an extra leg-spinner, an extra left-arm spinner, an extra seamer. He gives you one extra person in the side. He ‘enables’ everybody else around him.” And this emphasis on multi-functionality – besides Stokes, Rajasthan have at least half a dozen all-rounders on their roster, including Livingstone, Gopal, Gowtham and Jofra Archer – allows the Royals to be more versatile and less predictable on the field.

The big question, of course, is how to translate all this into a rupee value. Ahead of the auction, the Royals will spend four solid days ahead running practice simulations, with a different staff member playing each franchise. They will arrive at the auction room armed with a list of targets, a suggested price range for each, and a decision tree for various auction scenarios: how to proceed if they miss out on a key target, or end up spending more than expected, or less. And yet, none of this is an exact science. As Bharucha puts it: “You need to feel the room.”

And so as well as keeping tabs on their own expenditure, Rajasthan will be feeling out their rivals: what they have left, what gaps they still need to fill, who they might target. Different teams have different characteristics. “We know that Mumbai Indians don’t like to faff about at the back end of the auction looking for cheap buys,” Bharucha says. “They want to come in, find their players, and then bugger off.”

Co-owner of Rajasthan Royals Manoj Badale at the press conference for the IPL acution in Jaipur (AP)

So it was, then, that the Royals took to the auction room in Jaipur, on the lookout for two Indian seamers, two foreign batsmen who could also bowl an over or two, an Indian batsman, and an overseas seamer. They picked up their former seamer JD Unadkat for a hefty £950,000 – although around £350,000 less than they paid for him last year – but as in most years, preferred to wait until the latter stages of the auction, when depleted budgets mean players can often be snapped up on the cheap. So it proved with the likes of Thomas, Livingstone, the highly-rated opener Manan Vohra and the promising young Australian all-rounder Ashton Turner.

“You will always have some players in mind to buy,” says Manoj Badale, the team owner and the man with his hand on the fateful paddle. “We are very happy to have successfully filled all the required roles and more during the auction. We did end up waiting to the very end for three of our players, and managed to purchase them cost-effectively.”

Of course, the success or failure of the Royals’ auction strategy won’t become clear for another three months, when the 12th season of the IPL begins and a team constructed on paper can finally take shape on the field. And for all the preparation and detail that goes into recruitment, it’s still out in the middle, and not on the spreadsheet, where games are won and lost. But as they cross the boundary for their first game, the Royals and their backroom staff will at least be secure in the knowledge that – in theory at least – they’ve given themselves the best possible chance.