What the Auction Billboard Never Shows: The Real Price Belongs to the 23rd Man

When Mitchell Starc's price in the Dubai auction hall settled at 24.75 crore rupees (about $2.98 million) last December, I was sitting in a tea shop in Barishal — a stained TV screen, a blown-out speaker, steam rising off the cup. Kolkata Knight Riders' paddle went up, whistles broke out across the shop. The sixteen-year-old beside me nudged my shoulder and said, "Aunty, if they paid that much for him, they have to win the title now, right?"

That same night a photo arrived on my phone from Barishal Divisional Stadium. Five in the morning, three groundstaff standing knee-deep in water, dragging covers. It had rained all night; the field had to be saved. The auction camera will never show those three men. My argument today is simple — the biggest price at an auction does not win a trophy; the trophy is won by the 23rd man, the one no billboard ever names.

The mainstream view is familiar to me, and it is not a bad one: in franchise cricket money means stars, stars mean one spell on a knockout night — a spell that can swallow a whole season's labour in a single over. Talk shows break the auction down into five names, and the analysis ends at the fees attached to those five. That argument is strong, and last year it found strong evidence, which I will get to later.

The problem lies elsewhere. Cricket's transfer window is not built like football's. There is no year-long bargaining, no cinematic agent drama. There is a purse cap, a retention list, a right-to-match card, and a fresh 25-man sheet every year — of which eleven take the field. Which means seventy percent of the purse goes to two or three names, and the other twenty are filled at base price. That is cricket's real beauty. A tournament lasting twenty-six days is decided by men for whom no twenty-six-day poster is ever printed.

Last year, while all of Asia talked about Pat Cummins at 20.50 crore and Starc at 24.75 crore, I was doing a different sum in my notebook.

Let me do it plainly. A league season runs fourteen to seventeen matches. Eleven players take the field each time, which is roughly 180 to 190 playing slots across the campaign. Assume, generously, that six of those per match belong to men bought at base price or near it. That is over a hundred slots a season for base-price players. The ticker on the broadcast never lists them; the broadcast lists the fees.

A basic point is worth stating here, because this piece will be read by people new to modern cricket accounting. Price and value are not the same thing. Price is set in a market — by how many hands went up, how open everyone's purse was, how desperate one franchise had become. Value is set on the field, in the sixteenth over, when the fourth bowler has to bowl and only seven fielders are inside the circle. The gap between market price and field value is the biggest story in any auction, and nobody prints it.

I have watched this game for forty-eight years, mostly from the ground, from one fixed corner of the Barishal gallery. From that corner one thing is visible. Devotees of the top six names are often the ones walking off with drooping shoulders in the final over. The ones who enter the XI within a schoolboy's reach from the first row are the ones who hit the six in that final over.

Tactically, slots 12 to 25 are no longer break-glass parts; they are the spine of the plan. The Impact Player rule has made this more true. A side can now field one player with the bat and another with the ball — effectively two XIs. Which means the twelfth man is not someone sitting on a bench, he is half of the match plan. That is why judging a squad by its fees alone is wrong, and staying silent about fees is equally wrong.

Now the field arithmetic. If a side pours sixty percent of its purse into an opening pair, who is its fifth bowler? Either an all-rounder or a twenty-year-old. And his first over arrives in the sixth or seventh, after the powerplay, with the ring open, and the two best fielders placed deep at exactly that moment. Save that one over and the patience of the whole match changes. That work belongs to the 23rd man, the one the television camera does not seek, the one for whom no slow-motion reel is made.

I climbed down from the press box to the balcony and found the crowd's eyes sharper than mine. Last season, in one corner of the ground, a sixteen-year-old explained to me which spinner's over a left-handed batter would find more useful. Starc's fee was not in his head; the length of the spell and the line were. The language of the market and the language of the field keep two different dictionaries.

I remember those empty stadiums during the pandemic. We learned then that the twelfth man is all of us — and that without us the game does not exist, only the camera does. The skateboard kid in the empty stand taught me that night what loyalty actually costs.

The real drama of an auction, then, is not the price drama; it is the arithmetic that follows the release list and the retention sheet. What a franchise kept, and at what price, tells you what its 23rd man will look like. The money saved on two absent stars is spent on the boy who shows up at the nets at six every morning regardless of his pay slip. The luxury of two fielders deep, one extra over for the third spinner — these are decided by the money in those empty slots.

And the other ledger in this piece is the ledger of invisible labour. Hasem Mia has worked as groundstaff at Barishal Divisional Stadium for twenty-seven years. On rainy days his shift ends after the match, sometimes at three in the morning. I told him my thesis — that the 23rd man on the field is the one who really wins trophies. He was quiet for a moment and his face screwed up.

"Madam, you write poetry from the balcony," Hasem Mia said. "I pull covers and wonder whether my salary rises next month. My son dreams of becoming a good cricketer, bowls in the nets every day, and his name will never go on a billboard. The money goes to the big names. You talk about saving the field; leave saving the trophy alone."

He flattened my entire thesis neatly, and that was good for me. That same night the teenager did his own work. I asked whether he knew the name of the base-price boy who batted at number five. He said, "Aunty, I don't know him. And what if I did? Nobody buys his jersey. I'll buy the big name's jersey."

He is no representative of some noble truth. Out of self-interest he will happily buy the star's shirt, and the base-price boy's shirt still will not be printed. But my argument survives, because what stings him is not cruelty — it is how cheap his own loyalty has become.

Now the stress test, and here I will put the opposing case at full volume first. Last year's IPL final was contested by those two record buys — Starc's Kolkata and Cummins' Hyderabad. With that one line my thesis can be surrounded from every side. And I have to swallow it, because those two fast bowlers' knockout spells genuinely turned matches. If one spell can equal a whole season, then Hasem Mia is right: money and morality sit in separate ledgers.

The argument still does not hold, and the reason is simple. Hyderabad's batting engine was run by Abhishek Sharma and Nitish Kumar Reddy — domestic then, uncapped then, two young men. Kolkata's middle-over weapons were low-cost domestic spin and retained old faces. The two expensive buys opened the door; the base-price men walked through it. That is not evidence against my case — it is the clearest picture of it.

Let me be honest about one more thing. Old habits overreach; a long memory can reach into any decade and pull out a convenient name. To avoid that trap I write the number against myself: two record buys appearing in one final may be coincidence, and in a purse-cap economy the risk of pouring fat money into one place and thinning the rest of the sheet is real. But the risk itself favours my case — because a side can stay unbeaten in six of seven matches on the strength of its lower order, provided that lower order is built.

An unknown bowler from Birsiri, a wicketkeeper who has played two practice games, a young man who walks in for an injured quick — no posters carry their names, but the league table collects its points through their hands. This is the most durable truth of all my years watching: you judge a good team by its best XI, and you judge a genuinely deep squad by numbers 12 to 25.

So in the coming window I will watch not the big buys but those small slots that never make the news ticker. A bet, on the record: in the next franchise season, the side that spends at least a third of its purse on slots 12 to 18, and that gives a base-price under-23 player a run of consecutive matches across the league stage, will finish in the top four. Keep your notebook open — in twenty-six days we will check.