D3 auction: Where the crores are made up and the points don’t matter
“Welcome to ‘Whose Line Is It Anyway?’, the show where everything's made up and the points don't matter.”
On August 5, 1998, host Drew Carey opened the first episode of the American version of the show with that now-famous line, setting up the irreverent nature of an improv comedy show disguised as a game show.
In each episode, four comedians competed in different rounds, after which the host handed out points, anywhere from negative 1000 to a jillion, though the points were never the point.
All that mattered was that everyone had a good time, including the viewers at home.
On Monday, in a glitzy ballroom of a five-star hotel in Dhaka, the Bangladesh Cricket Board (BCB) staged the players’ auction for the inaugural Domestic 3 (D3) Trophy, where crores were splurged but nobody’s purse got any lighter.
For the tournament, which will span three formats, six teams were each allotted 10 crore, and had to rope in 22 players from five different categories, with base prices ranging from 5 lakh in Category E to 40 lakh in Category A. Categories B, C and D were set at 30 lakh, 20 lakh and 10 lakh, respectively.
National team pacer Shoriful Islam fetched the highest bid, 2.3 crore from Citizens Bank. Walton Group spent 2.1 crore on pacer Taskin Ahmed, Fortune spent 2 crore on opener Tanzid Hasan Tamim, 1.55 crore on Test skipper Najmul Hossain Shanto, while Blue Star splurged 1.6 crore on Mahedi Hasan and 1.55 crore on Litton Das.
Even uncapped spinner Mohammad Rubel fetched an astounding 1.14 crore from Acme, potentially a life-changing amount for a cricketer who began playing competitive cricket just last year – only if it were real.
Just like the points in the show, the crores spent in the auction were all made up. The 10 crores were not currency but “auction points”, and it never mattered how much a team splurged on a player, as their payment was pre-decided.
Players will receive BCB-set match fees of 1.5 lakh taka per four-day match, 1 lakh taka per one-day game, and 80,000 taka per T20 fixture. The competition will feature 42 matches: 19 T20s, 16 one-day games and seven four-day fixtures.
The BCB launched the D3 Trophy on September 27, bringing T20, one-day and four-day competitions under one structure to revive interest in domestic cricket, and to offset the players’ financial losses with the Bangladesh Premier League (BPL) not taking place this season.
The BCB claims the points-based auction system was introduced to ensure balance between teams, as it stops franchises with more spending power from building stronger squads.
However, the players’ draft system the BCB has used in some previous editions of the BPL can effectively ensure the same, without the theatre.
In the BPL, the real gap in team strength came from direct signings of local and overseas players, which the BCB never regulated. D3 has no direct signings at all, so the auction has no imbalance left to fix.
Still, Monday's spectacle delivered what it promised: bidding wars, big numbers and entertainment. It was all make-believe, but nobody seemed to mind. Like Drew Carey's audience, everyone left smiling.