The stage couldn?t have been more interesting. A controversial build-up, an unprecedented 350 players going under the hammer, as much as Rs 270 crore to be spent in a day and a half, the spectre of Lalit Modi to be exorcised, and finally, with two new entrants joining the fray, the tournament is getting bigger in scale and scope.

The auction, more than anything, was a financial planner?s delight. How much do you spend on a certain player while making sure you still have fuel left in the tank to put a balanced team out in the park? If you don?t get option A, do you have a plan B? More often than not, both plan A and plan B may not work. In such a scenario, is there a back-up plan C? Have you kept the heat of April and May in mind when picking your players? It was a game of chess involving multiple players and the stakes were huge. A failed auction and a franchise will be ruing the mistake for three long years. And, in a competition where instant success is the mantra, three years can well mean curtains for the coach and the support staff, or even the franchise itself.

Questions doing the rounds before the auction were as follows: Do you go for an explosive side like the Mumbai Indians or will you border on caution a la the Rajasthan Royals and minimise your spend? Do you go for brands to rake in the endorsements or do you go in for a specialised T-20 side? And, finally, how do you put a cap on a player?s capabilities, especially with the World Cup expected to tire out the best of performers?

Surely, it was the mother of all gambles, making it all the more exciting.

With the venue moving to Bangalore because of logistical reasons, it was surely a test for the post-Modi BCCI. For, it was the first auction in February 2008 that had given Modi?s IPL a headstart. And, by all yardsticks, it must be acknowledged that the BCCI has done well in Bangalore. They have used the very same men who constituted Modi?s army in 2008. Retaining the services of IMG and its boss Sundar Raman, the BCCI ensured that it had the experience to fall back on. And then it needed to get the basics right. Convert the auction into a mega television event, ensure that it was telecast live by the host broadcaster while the buzz was created by the news channels, get in the right mix of players, ensure the bigger names were all out there and brief the teams about exact procedure. All of this was done to near perfection. With the Indian team playing some fantastic cricket for over a year now and with the India-South Africa series living up to the billing of a contest between the two best sides in the world, the BCCI?s work had become a tad easier. Cricket, gradually, was/is taking over from the scams that dominated the news headlines in the latter half of 2010. And with reasonable glamour out in Bangalore to satisfy the 100 or so news channel cameras, IPL 4 got off to a start that should give the BCCI confidence before the tournament finally begins on April 9.

In terms of preparations, there was much focus on the uncapped players on the eve of the auction?emphasis that has now resulted in streetfights between franchise owners in the post-auction scenario. This is because a bunch of reasonable uncapped players, with base price varying between Rs 10 lakh and Rs 30 lakh, could potentially allow a franchise the option to splurge at the auction. For a franchise that may have chalked out a plan to pick 14 uncapped players, spending Rs 3 crore or so, Rs 33 crore remained available to buy 11-12 established players at the auction. This strategy, however, was steeped in risk with the BCCI pre-empting franchise owners from speaking to uncapped players before the auction. Accordingly, teams went about the auction the other way round. They picked up 12-14 players at an average and are now filling the gaps with talented uncapped players, making them near or even more valuable than some of the auction picks. This explains five or more franchises sending requisition forms for a Ambati Rayadu or Manish Pandey, stars of IPL seasons 3 and 2, respectively.

Coming to the auction itself, most of the big spends went along expected lines. It was inevitable that the five Indian stars?Yuvraj Singh, Zaheer Khan, Gautam Gambhir, Yusuf Pathan and Rohit Sharma?would command the highest bids at the auction. This is simply not because they are the best players available, but also because an Indian name is still preferred to lead an outfit and they are essential names to have on the roster to enlist sponsors for the next three seasons. More than foreigners, Indian names remain the tried and tested option as far as the market is concerned and this resulted in huge sums being spent on these stars. In fact, Rajasthan Royals, champions of season 1, found it impossible to find a lead sponsor in year two because they lacked an Indian face. Shane Warne and Shane Watson weren?t enough for the marketers. This explains why even a Umesh Yadav goes for $7,00,000, while Wayne Parnell was sold for a paltry $1,60,000. Again, the reason why Saurav Tiwari was bought for $1.6 million while Cameron White and Kevin Peterson fell way short of the million mark.

Finally, it must be acknowledged that in the post-auction scenario, the BCCI can hardly breathe easy. This is because of the peculiarities in the rulings of the IPL. While Saurav Tiwari and Ambati Rayadu were both stars of IPL season 3 and while Tiwari has earned a $1.6-million contract, Rayadu, because he is uncapped, stands to earn only Rs 30 lakh. Such discrepancies are sure to encourage corruption and underhand deals, negotiations the BCCI and the IPL governing council will find impossible to control. But when was the IPL about fair play and ethics in the first place!

?The writer is a sports historian