Cricket 2.0

by Tim Wigmore

  The auction is unique across all sport. While there are some similarities with the draft used in US sports leagues, that applies only to young players joining the league, and players are simply paid according to when they are selected in the draft. During IPL ‘big auctions’, all players are up for sale, barring a few whom teams choose to retain from before. There is no predetermined price; a player’s price is only settled when teams have stopped their bidding from the auction floor, and the auctioneer can use his hammer and declare the player sold. Teams can spend what they want on whomever they want, as long as they adhere to the salary cap, which has risen to 80 crore – about £9 million – in 2019.

  Those who thrive in this high-octane environment are those who can out-think the competition. Sides are not merely preoccupied with the players they want. They are just as worried about what everyone else wants; if a team overpays for one player, that means less to spend on everyone else, because of the salary caps and opportunities for other sides to sign players for less than they should be worth. It is commonplace for sides to bid for players they don’t particularly want, in the hope of starting a bidding war and ramping up the price to leave their rivals less cash to spend elsewhere. With every lot, each team is not merely considering how suitable the player is for their side, they are considering how suitable the player is for the other seven teams too. Every lot subtly changes the power dynamics in the need, and the relationship between what teams want and what they can afford.

  Paradoxically, getting the player you most want can be ruinous; if you overspend, it means not enough money to spend elsewhere. The notion of good value is laid to waste as owners – who, in most teams except KKR, generally have the final say – seek to sign their favourite cricketers; Stephen Fleming, the Rising Pune Supergiant coach, resembled a ghost after Pune paid £1.7 million for England all-rounder Ben Stokes in 2017. In the same year, England’s Tymal Mills provoked a bidding war after a fine recent run in T20 games; franchises were seduced by recent performances and the allure of a left-arm pace bowler. Mills was sold to Royal Challengers Bangalore for £1.4 million yet played only five games. The next season, no one signed Mills at all. In Cricket Fever, a Netflix documentary following the Mumbai Indians in 2018, Mumbai’s owner makes it clear that he will not countenance failing to sign Krunal Pandya. Pandya ended up going to Mumbai for £0.92 million, after rivals ratcheted up the price.

  ‘Some just want a player because someone else wants them,’ one insider said. The most sought-after players can be affected by the winner’s curse: they end up being overpriced, destabilising the rest of their team’s auction strategy.

  Perhaps nothing is as important as the auction in determining teams’ fates. A bad ‘big auction’ does not merely set a franchise back a season, it can result in years of misery. And a good auction – not outspending the competition, but out-thinking them – can set a team up for years of success. Because domestic T20 leagues are set up to ensure competitive balance between sides, those teams who can find the best answer to a simple question – how do you put a price on a cricketer? – are best-placed to win.

  Mysore realised this process was much too important to be left to chance. And so, before his first auction in 2011, KKR outsourced research to a software company based in Chennai. The company established a bidding system based on decision trees, thereby allowing the management to conduct mock auctions and prepare for various scenarios. Auction strategies for other teams were also drawn up, allowing KKR to deduce whom their rivals wanted to buy and whether, if they overspent, it would create bargains for Kolkata in other areas. The decision-making team – typically Mysore, the head and assistant coach, the team manager and Srikkanth, the data analyst and talent scout – conducted mock auctions to prepare for having to make decisions about whether or not to spend millions of dollars on a player in a couple of seconds.

  ‘Randomness isn’t under any franchise’s control,’ Srikkanth explained. ‘You just have to plan for every situation and play it by ear.’ The process could be as tense as any cricket match and helped determine teams’ fortunes for years.

  Being as well prepared as possible enabled KKR to be nimble and seize unexpected opportunities on auction day. In the process, they could take advantage of blasé opponents. KKR have what the team call a circuit breaker for every player – an upper price limit they are assigned before the auction, to prevent emotion getting in the way of cold judgement on auction day. Kolkata can go above the circuit breaker, but they need a compelling reason to do so. Ideally, Kolkata only go above a ‘circuit breaker’ if they have previously got a player for less than their recommended price during the auction.

  Mysore’s new approach fundamentally deviated from the orthodoxy in the IPL. Unlike other sides, he refrained from targeting players to be captain, avoiding the risk of overpaying. In the 2011 and 2018 big auctions, KKR had no particular name in mind to be captain, only delegating the position after they had assembled their complete squad.

  He avoided star players when they were overpriced. While other sides hoarded talent, KKR favoured a lean squad; what was the sense in paying for eight expensive overseas players, when they could only pick four in each starting XI? Under Mysore, KKR routinely had the smallest squad in the IPL; in 2018, they had only seven overseas players and a 19-man squad, when every other team had eight overseas players and a squad stretching the limit of the 25 players permitted. The rationale was that it was more efficient to have fewer, better players, who would all have a realistic chance of making the XI and KKR could invest time in improving.

  KKR developed a distinctive on-field style too. With their home pitch at Eden Gardens generally favouring spin, and producing relatively low-scoring games, Kolkata developed a template for how to win games that extended far beyond any individual players. ‘It would be safe to say we have always fielded a very strong bowling unit ever since I’ve been involved from 2011 onwards. That’s an important part of the philosophy of the KKR style of cricket,’ Mysore explained. This informed the type of cricketers KKR sought to recruit, and then retain. ‘So there’s a common theme, I think, in how we have always thought which makes it simpler for us.’

  At the auction table, KKR consistently prioritised specialist T20 skills over established names. More than any other franchise, they were reliably able to extract value from the bedlam of the auction floor.

  In 2012, Sunil Narine, a mystery spinner from Trinidad and Tobago, who could turn the ball both ways, was only a year into his T20 career, and had played just 16 matches. He had played three one-day internationals for the West Indies against India, performing unremarkably. But KKR had observed Narine’s mesmerising bowling during the 2011 Champions League, a competition for the world’s leading domestic teams, when he took 5 for 18 across eight overs against two IPL sides. The more they perused footage of Narine bowling in domestic games in the Caribbean, the more they were convinced that he was worth a huge investment, especially as Eden Gardens, Kolkata’s home ground, was tailored to spin bowling. ‘We don’t need anyone else,’ Gautam Gambhir, KKR’s captain, told Mysore. KKR had considered the veteran Australian left-arm wrist spinner Brad Hogg, whose experience seemed to make him less of a risk, but all their research on Narine had told them he was a player with the capacity to transform the franchise’s fortunes.

  The problem was, Mumbai Indians wanted Narine too. Sitting next to Mysore during the auction, Srikkanth kept imploring Mysore to raise his paddle again and again, even as KKR nudged above their ‘circuit breaker’ price for Narine. By the time Mysore had raised his paddle for the final time, Narine, with a base price of £31,000, had ended up costing KKR £441,000. The prize was based on data, scouting Narine in person and through TV footage and simple ‘gut feel’, Mysore said.

  It seemed an absurd fee for a cricketer just dipping his toes into international cricket. But KKR were vindicated. Narine took 24 wickets in the 2012 IPL and conceded runs at a parsimonious 5.47 an over, a record for any IPL season and the p
relude to a magnificent career for Kolkata. While he was player of the tournament, leading Kolkata to their maiden IPL title, Ganguly’s Pune Warriors languished in last place.

  Glimpsing the potential to gain a competitive advantage through enlightened use of data and forensic planning for the auction encouraged KKR to double down on their approach. ‘It’s all about enough time being invested in preparation – very rarely are we caught on the wrong foot and have to scramble,’ Mysore said.

  Before the 2014 auction KKR enlisted SAP, a software company who had been involved in Formula 1 and American sport, to develop a statistical analysis tool designed to assist the management in decision-making during the auction. The tool married player insights with intelligence on the other squads and their remaining funds to predict various scenarios and assist Kolkata in split-second decisions in real time. At each break in the auction, Mysore and the team would scrutinise the software.

  ‘Many different types of businesses that I’ve been involved in also do a lot of this number-crunching analytics to arrive at good decisions. The environment is so dynamic that it’s very important to be prepared,’ Mysore said. ‘It helps us to become a bit unemotional. And you become emotional when you start thinking in names.’

  KKR use a system with around 25 data points to evaluate players before every auction. They pay particular attention to contextualising numbers. So, rather than simply look at a batsman’s strike rate, Kolkata look at it in the context of the game situation, preventing them being seduced by players who seem to score quickly, but whose numbers are less impressive given that they play in high-scoring leagues. Scrutinising players in this way allows Kolkata to avoid succumbing to recent bias, and overpaying for players who have just enjoyed an outstanding recent run. As well as standard metrics – strike rate and boundary percentage for batsmen; economy rate in different phases of the game for bowlers, to see how they compare with the competition – KKR use numbers to get a sense of a cricketer’s character and temperament too. For bowlers, KKR place special emphasis on seeing how a bowler performs after their first over is hit, or after a poor match. In the cauldron of the IPL, over 14 league matches, no bowler is likely to be immune from punishment; it is how they return from grim bowling figures that separates the best from the rest.

  ‘Numbers don’t lie,’ said Mysore. ‘But numbers are not the be all and end all.’

  Kolkata’s system divided up potential players in two ways. First, those who are proficient at crucial, yet fairly common, skills – hitting at the death, say, or left-arm orthodox spin. For such players KKR ‘have multiple options,’ Mysore said. ‘You can afford to wait and try and acquire those skills not necessarily at very high costs.’

  The other type of player possesses rare skills – as a death bowler or spinner able to bowl in all phases of the game, say. For these players, KKR expect to pay more. ‘You can call it a demand and supply situation. There are certain types of skills which are not very easy to get which is where you probably have to be willing to reach into your pocket and spend the money. It’s about the auction dynamics, how the marketplace works in that environment and what you’re looking for.’

  Before every auction, KKR like to reduce the number of options for each position down to under ten, Srikkanth explained. ‘And then we would screen them down based on numbers, recent form, recent injury history, what’s their attitude been like on and off the field? Have they got a clean record, in terms of being non-controversial?’ Players are ranked by preference, and suggested price, allowing Kolkata to be as well prepared as possible, and recognise players who are comparatively underpriced on the market. Before Kolkata signed Chris Lynn in the 2018 auction, other explosive overseas openers – such as Jason Roy, Colin Munro, Chris Gayle, Quinton de Kock and Chris Gayle – were also on their shortlist.

  After implementing their refined auction planning system in 2014, another ‘big auction’, KKR enjoyed one of the most successful auctions of any franchise in history. Before the 2014 auction, the Jamaican all-rounder Andre Russell had been released by Delhi Daredevils; he had been a peripheral player, featuring in only seven matches over two seasons. Yet as they scoured the market for all-rounders – initially they thought they just needed a back-up to Jacques Kallis – Kolkata recognised how Russell, who had already won one T20 World Cup, had been misused by Delhi. Russell cost only 60 lakhs (£60,000); one season later, he was named as the IPL’s Most Valuable Player. In 2016, Russell won five T20 trophies with five different teams, confirming his status as the world’s leading T20 player.

  At the same time as they signed Russell, KKR also recruited Kuldeep Yadav, even though he had yet to play a professional match in any format. Srikkanth had stumbled across Kuldeep playing in a Buchi Babu game, a preseason tournament to prepare players for the first-class season, in Chennai the year before. He was wowed less by Kuldeep’s numbers – there were scarcely anything to go by – than his potential in cricket’s rarest art, left-arm wrist spin. Srikkanth promptly called Trevor Bayliss, who was Kolkata’s coach, and texted Mysore to tell them about what he had seen. Further scouting of Kuldeep before the auction backed up Srikkanth’s thinking. Within a week of KKR signing him for a budget 40 lakhs (£40,000), the fourth-lowest price available in the auction, Kuldeep took a hat-trick for India U-19s in the World Cup. By the time the year was out, Kuldeep had excelled in the Champions League; three years later, he made a terrific start to his international career.

  With both the signings of Russell and Kuldeep, Kolkata exploited one advantage that the IPL auction gave teams. In ‘big auctions’, players were signed for three-year contracts – but only if the team wanted them to be. The team had all the power; they were free to release a player after one or two years of his deal, or retain him at the same price. This rewarded sides who could think ahead and plan for a whole cycle. Players like Russell and Kuldeep had a huge potential upside, yet their costs, and risks, were minimised. This meant they could be incorporated slowly at first – Russell only played two IPL games in 2014, and Kuldeep none – and then, when established as integral players, still be paid well under what they would have commanded on the open market. Srikkanth and Mysore were like investors spotting stocks that would soar in a couple of years.

  Like any good scout, Srikkanth’s success was underpinned by sheer hard work; he travelled to leagues all year round and scoured spreadsheets for undervalued players. But KKR’s method was not so much to embrace data at the expense of human judgement as to fuse the two.

  ‘We give directives to the scouts as to what to look for and what not to look for and how to identify someone. Once we are satisfied with what we’ve heard, we’d call the player and go directly ourselves to have a better look,’ Srikkanth explained. ‘Numbers can be quite misleading as well. You can’t purely base your decisions on numbers alone. It’s got to be a good mixture of both cricketing intelligence as well as numbers.’

  Srikkanth was integral to KKR’s rise, helping Mysore and Bayliss identify talent. ‘He was very important when it came to the auctions and selecting players that we didn’t know much about and doing his homework and research with younger Indian players for example, not just the international players,’ Bayliss recalled.

  Since Mysore took over, KKR have generally eschewed buying the most high-profile overseas players. As of 2019, KKR’s three most-celebrated overseas players were Narine, Chris Lynn and Russell. None had arrived at KKR viewed as among the world’s biggest T20 stars; now, all were.

  ‘Venky has given me a cushion and trusted in my decision-making which has helped me go there and look for talent positively and be a little more carefree and willing to take a punt on any player,’ Srikkanth said. ‘Venky has empowered me to make those decisions and given me a free hand to look at talent and get them down to KKR. Before Venky came it was quite different because everyone was getting used to how franchise cricket would be run. T20 was very new. So the decision-making was not as professional as it is now.

  ‘J
ust turning up for the tournament and picking random players because you heard those players are good from someone else – it doesn’t work that way any more. It has to be through a process and it has to be quality work and quality time put behind every season to pick those players to represent your team.’

  After the successes of Russell and Narine – and successfully pushing for KKR to get other players who performed impressively at budget prices, like Bangladesh all-rounder Shakib Al Hasan and Netherlands all-rounder Ryan ten Doeschate, scouted based on his performances in the English T20 competition – Srikkanth became even more ambitious. The best way of all to identify undervalued talent, he figured, was to find players outside the professional system.

  One of Srikkanth’s other roles was as a performance analyst for the Bijapur Bulls in the Karnataka Premier League, one of the intrastate T20 leagues – smaller copycat versions of the IPL, organised and controlled by state associations in India. Srikkanth recognised that his role allowed him to scout players before others were aware of them. He saw K.C. Cariappa, a leg-spinner with abundant variations, originally honed playing gully cricket with a tennis ball, in the nets and in matches, and was wowed by his promise. Srikkanth organised for Cariappa to bowl to KKR in the nets before the 2014 Champions League, and the team were impressed.

  Before the 2015 auction, Madley had never even practised pronouncing Cariappa’s name; he did not have a profile page on the exhaustive global cricket website, ESPNcricinfo. ‘I was told there was no chance these players would even be presented to the auction. After the event, one is wised.’

  Cariappa’s lot began at 10 lakh (£10,000). By the time it ended, after a bidding war between KKR and Delhi – whose team mentor, T.A. Sekhar, had been impressed with Cariappa in televised Karnataka Premier League matches – Cariappa had been sold to KKR for 240 lakhs (£240,000).