Mumbai : The Indian Premier League (IPL) players’ auction for 4th edition of 2011 season will be held on Jan 8 and 9 in Mumbai, the cricket body’s Governing Council announced on Wednesday.
The auction in all probability will be on the scale of the first one, held in 2008, with teams starting largely from scratch, and will be held under rules framed in Sep 2010.
The auction was scheduled for November this year, but uncertainty over the composition of the tournament – with two franchises expelled and a third, Kochi, in limbo – forced a postponement for indefinite period until of the day.
The Governing Council, which met here, was expected to have discussed the status of the Kochi franchise. But Rajiv Shukla, the Board of Control for Cricket in India’s (BCCI) vice-president and council member, did not comment on it. He said the 2011 season would have eight participating teams.
Kochi have until Nov 27 to reply to the IPL’s notice asking it to set its house in order, but the franchise owners failed and decided to quit.
The IPL will start the auction process for a replacement team. With a majority of the current franchises in the southern half of the country, any new franchise is likely to be from the north – with Ahmedabad the front-runner.
The new auction rules governing player retention, which have been criticised by the franchises, allow a team to keep up to four players but at a steep price.
The first player retained will cost a team $1.8 million against the salary cap of $9 million, regardless of the amount the player is actually paid. The second player will cost $1.3 million, the third $900,000 and the fourth $500,000.