The ₹10.75 Crore Question: Hyderabad's Auction, Audited Ten Months Later

Bengaluru, 13 February 2026, the third hour of the afternoon. The bidding for Nicholas Pooran crossed ten crore and the laptop on the Sunrisers Hyderabad table was shut. Every franchise in that hall had two screens — one for the auction, one for the names filed under ‘we will come back to this’. Hyderabad’s table had more paper than screen. I was sitting in the third row of the press gallery, from where you can see the hands that raise the paddle and not the faces behind them.

The previous afternoon, 12 February, the same hall had read out Rashid Khan’s name. No paddle rose from the Hyderabad table. Gujarat Titans took him for fifteen crore, and that franchise’s first season was decided by that one purchase. Twenty-four hours later, Hyderabad paid ten crore seventy-five lakh for a batter who, at that point, had not produced a single consecutive IPL season that could be called settled.

This is not an auction report. Those were filed in February, and most of them closed with the line that Hyderabad without Rashid was an incomplete team. This is the ledger opened ten months later, when the table has already told you what six wins in fourteen matches were worth, and which mistake was the expensive one.

My notebook has two pages from that auction. The first carries the bids. The second carries my own predictions, written in a hotel room that same night so that I would not be allowed, later, to say I had called it. Ten months on, the page shows that I read the biggest deal of the auction correctly and the biggest need of that squad incorrectly.

The first page of the file

Hyderabad arrived at that auction with three retentions: Kane Williamson at fourteen crore, Abdul Samad at four crore, Umran Malik at four crore. Twenty-two crore in all. From a purse of ninety crore, sixty-eight remained, and out of those sixty-eight the franchise had to build a bowling attack that could function without Rashid Khan.

One rule has to be remembered here, because that rule turned Hyderabad’s strategy into its fate. The 2026 mega auction had no Right to Match. A player you released could not be reclaimed on a preferred right. In the older cycle, franchises released a cricketer and bought him back cheaply through RTM; that door was shut. Letting Rashid go was therefore not a tactical decision. It was a structural one, and structural decisions are usually paid for not in the same season but in the next phase of the squad’s life.

The trouble had started in 2026, and it was not only a bowling problem. The captaincy changed mid-season, David Warner was removed from the leadership and then from the XI, and the team finished at the bottom. When a franchise exits a season like that, there are two roads: keep the spine and attach new limbs, or replace the spine. Hyderabad chose the first — Williamson retained, two young players retained — and then spent the rest of the purse on players who were supposed to fit that spine.

‘Fit’ is the most spoken and least tested word in any auction room. I have not heard a single franchise official in eighteen years say ‘we chose the wrong fit’. They say ‘the player did not perform’. That is the difference between a ledger and an excuse.

The arithmetic of the purse

The headline buys, as per the official bidding list of the auction held in Bengaluru on 12–13 February 2026: Pooran ₹10.75 crore, Washington Sundar ₹8.75 crore, Rahul Tripathi ₹8.50 crore, Romario Shepherd ₹7.75 crore, Abhishek Sharma ₹6.50 crore, Bhuvneshwar Kumar ₹4.20 crore, Marco Jansen ₹4.20 crore, T Natarajan ₹4 crore, Kartik Tyagi ₹4 crore, Aiden Markram ₹2.60 crore.

Add it up by function, and the split is roughly forty-six crore on batting and thirty-seven on bowling, with the remainder on backups. The split itself is not the error. Plenty of champion teams spend more on batting. The error is the sequence. Hyderabad bought batters first and then worked out how to stand a bowling attack behind them. In an auction, sequence is strategy — money spent early does not return to the room where the need appears later.

This is where the outside reading went wrong. The next morning’s papers called it a balanced auction, an all-rounder-heavy squad. In truth the squad was full of all-rounders whose two skills sat at very different levels. Shepherd’s bat arrived before his ball; Sundar’s ball before his bat. Labelling both as all-rounders meant buying two half-players at the price of whole ones.

The ₹10.75 crore question

The debate about Pooran’s price is framed wrongly, then and now. The question is not whether he is worth ten crore seventy-five. The question is which problem the franchise was trying to solve with that money, and whether that money could solve it.

Pooran’s game lives in a specific place: he needs an old ball and a tired bowler. His fastest cricket is in the last six overs, when he can play his first ball as a shot and does not have to worry about the bigger side of the ground. Send him in at the ninth over, against spin, with the pressure of settling in, and you will not get what you paid for.

That is where the real error sits. The franchise bought a batter whose entire value is set by his entry point, and bought nothing above him to improve that entry point. The top order remained what it had been — an anchor, a young batter finding his game, an opener who has to prove his place every season.

Through that season, the clips I reopened most often were the innings in which Pooran walked in at the eleventh or thirteenth over and had to spend his first five or six balls simply surviving. By late June my sheet carried a note: do not send him in before the fifteenth. Nobody at the franchise asked for that note.

The reverse is equally true, which is why this argument is not one-sided. Had Hyderabad saved him ten more deliveries higher up, the arithmetic of ten crore seventy-five would read differently. Ten deliveries is not a target; it is the gap between a correct opener and an incorrect one. In the IPL, the price of an expensive finisher is never set by his own bat. It is set by the three men standing above him.

The ₹8.75 crore spinner who never bowled the powerplay

Sundar’s purchase looked intelligent that day, and it belongs on the list of calls I got wrong. I wrote: four overs in the powerplay, four at the death, and a bat at seven — that is a genuine all-rounder. The problem was that he never got the powerplay, because the team’s new-ball plan was built around Bhuvneshwar and Jansen.

This is the oldest mistake in franchise cricket: buy on capability, select on expectation. Two different lists are drawn and nobody owns the bridge between them. Sundar’s sharpest weapon is his accuracy with the new ball; the team bowled him in the middle and moved him up and down the batting order.

None of which makes the buy wrong. It makes the buy a contract rather than an investment, and a contract only pays out when it is used for the purpose it was written for. That is why I grade auctions on utilisation, not price. Price tells you what a franchise chose. Utilisation tells you what it understood.

The night after Rashid

Sixty-two days later the bubble began keeping its own ledger — something I learned in the UAE in 2026, when writing match reports between three bio-secure hotels and empty stadiums became a different trade. Between matches that season I logged 214 death overs from Hyderabad’s 2026 to 2026 seasons into a spreadsheet. It still sits on my laptop as unfinished project number two.

That sheet settled one thing in 2026 that nobody said on auction day. Nobody could replace Rashid’s four overs; everyone knew that. The real question was how those four overs would be distributed. A bowler who can stop any batter in any over buys freedom for the rest of the attack — you can use everyone else in their strongest phase. That freedom has never appeared on a bid sheet.

What followed was classic replacement by committee. One over in the twelfth, another in the sixteenth, a third in the eighteenth. Everyone got his overs; nobody got the overs where he was better than the alternative. The most repeated pattern in my final-over logs that season was a seventeenth over from one quick, an eighteenth from another, and the nineteenth back to the first — the man who had been held back, rushed at the end.

This is not a technicality. It shows up on the scoreboard. Without a bowler who can be used anywhere, every over needs a separate plan, and every plan is a risk. Fourteen matches of those risks add up to eighth place.

The fourteen-crore anchor

Every file has a margin; this captain lived in it. I have watched Williamson since 2026, when I spent hours in Hyderabad net sessions on his back-foot trigger movement and had roughly three quotes to show for it. In 2026, when the bans on Steven Smith and Warner handed him the captaincy, I had eleven months of those notes that nobody had commissioned. That side topped the table with nine wins; Williamson took the Orange Cap with 735 runs; Chennai Super Kings beat them by eight wickets at the Wankhede, Shane Watson 117 not out.

The captain arrived without a file, so the final wrote one.

But the 2026 question was not captaincy. It was price. Fourteen crore is the largest single line in a purse, and that line forces a franchise to decide what kind of team it is. If your most expensive player is an anchor, you are an anchor-built side — which means two openers who genuinely accelerate and a finisher with complete licence. Hyderabad had the first and not the second.

Here I part company with the press box. The line there is that T20 has moved past the anchor. I would put it differently: the anchor is still needed; the anchor’s price has collapsed. Those are two different sentences, and treating them as one is the most expensive error in franchise cricket.

The domestic scouting ledger

The best part of that auction drew the least comment. Tripathi at eight and a half crore, Abhishek at six and a half, Umran at four as a retention. All three point to a shift that has already happened quietly in Indian cricket and that the television box has not accepted.

Franchise scouting networks have replaced zonal selectors. A player once needed three Ranji seasons to enter the system’s eyeline. Now four overs at a trial put him on a data department’s screen. That is democratisation, and it has done more than any speech at a season opener.

Tripathi’s price is the cleanest evidence. Three franchises by then, and nobody had called him a star. Hyderabad paid eight and a half crore because his middle-overs scoring rate against spin sat exactly where the squad was empty. That purchase breaks the old logic that only big names win big matches.

There is a warning inside the same story, and I write it against my own enthusiasm. Domestic scouting only pays if it comes with a bowling plan. Hyderabad trusted domestic batters and domestic bowlers, then gave several of them half-chances in the hurry to judge within one season. Umran bowled few overs, then many, then few. Nothing is worse for a young quick: rhythm is built out of overs, not applause.

What the outside saw, what was inside

After every auction a consensus forms. In 2026 it was that Hyderabad lost their biggest weapon by releasing Rashid.

The consensus is correct and incomplete. Correct, because without him the bowling attack’s ceiling fell — visible in the season’s numbers and in matches the team won. Incomplete, because reading that auction as Rashid versus Pooran hides the mistake made three months earlier on the retention sheet.

That mistake was spending the largest share of the purse on a player whose game moves at a tempo the league was leaving behind. This is not a question about the cricketer’s ability. It is a question about a market that was overpaying for anchors, and Hyderabad turned out to be that market’s last big buyer.

The second thing invisible from outside: nobody asked why Tripathi went for eight and a half crore the same afternoon. Because the market was short of a specific slot — a number three or four who can play spin without fear. Big names are not expensive. Empty slots are.

My own grade

I published my grade ten months later, in print. It belongs here, because a writer who does not print his own error repeats it next cycle and calls it a lesson.

Pooran: not ‘right’, but ‘correctly priced’ — that was the market rate for that type of batter that year. The error was the structure around him, not the number.

Sundar: misread by me. I bought a four-over powerplay bowler; the team made him a middle-overs bowler. Part of that is my fault — I did not check that the franchise already had two new-ball bowlers, which left my plan on paper.

Tripathi: my best read. I wrote that night that this buy would matter in the match where, chasing 150, spin arrives in the twelfth over. There were several such matches.

Shepherd: my worst. Seven crore seventy-five for a player with no single skill at the top level. That is the buy that turned the attack into a committee.

And one thing I missed entirely: that Bhuvneshwar Kumar, the most experienced quick in the squad, would be used so sparingly. A ₹4.20 crore bowler becoming the fifth option is a selection problem, not an auction problem.

What to watch at the next auction

The first thing I will look at is not price. It is whether the franchise has drawn the usage map for its most expensive player before the bidding starts — which overs, which bowling, which partner. If that map is drawn after the auction, it is already late. The map comes first; players are fitted into it. Franchises that work the other way look like good teams every season and finish eighth every season.

The second: the domestic scouting ledger now sits with the franchises and nobody audits it. National selectors still read Ranji averages while teams pay crores on four trial overs. That gap will not close. It will widen. The question is who bends first — the scouting network or the selection sheet.

The third, and the one that matters most: the anchor market. If a franchise next cycle spends thirteen or fourteen crore on a retention for an anchor and does not buy two independent finishers around him, you will know it has read the table and not the scoreboard. The table tells you where you are. The scoreboard tells you why.

In that Bengaluru hall, one laptop was shut. Ten months on, I think it was not shut at all — it was open on the thing nobody wanted to look at that afternoon: the shape of that squad for the next three seasons, decided in a single day.