WPL Auction 2023 Highlights: Smriti Mandhana costliest player at ₹3.4 crore; Harmanpreet, Deepti, Jemimah hit jackpots

Ecclestone starts at a base price of ₹50 lakh. Gujarat Giants start the bidding, DC enter at ₹55 lakh. UP Warriorz come in at ₹1.2 crore. They take her at ₹1.8 crore.

The Australia allrounder started at a base price at ₹50 lakh. RCB and DC were the main contenders in the bidding war. RCB eventually are the ones who acquire her. 

Smriti Mandhana remains the most expensive thus far. Gardner had started at a base price of ₹50 lakh. Gujarat entered the race at ₹2.8 crore and eventually, acquired the Australia star at ₹3.2 crore. 

The New Zealand star goes to RCB at her base price of ₹50 lakh. West Indies' Hayley Mathews is up next and she goes unsold. Then there is a bidding war for Australia's Ashleigh Gardner and her price rockets pas ₹2 crore. Mumbai Indians and UP Warriorz are the main contenders. 

UP Warriorz entered the bid with ₹1.7 crore. Eventually, it is Mumbai Indians who acquire the Indian captain. 

RCB are in the contest for Harmanpreet as well and they are competing with Delhi Capitals at first before Mumbai Indians enter the fray after the Indian captain's price cros ₹1 crore. Is she going to surpass Mandhana?

Heavy bidding war early on for Smriti Mandhana between Mumbai Indians and RCB. A break in the war after MI's 2.3cr bid after which RCB tops it off to ₹2.6cr. Eventually the price crosses ₹3 cr. In the end, Smriti Mandhana is sold to RCB for ₹3.4 cr

“It is a landmark moment today. Bright young talents will be rubbing shoulders with some of the biggest superstars in world cricket. We at the BCCI believe that the WPL is going to change the landscape of the game forever. Interest that women's cricket has garnered is overwhelming. Hope the players are going to go under the hammer are as excited as us. There will be domestic players as well who will be hoping to make a mark for their franchise and eventually for their countries as well. We have seen unheard talents becoming household names in the men's league. Hopefully that is what happens in the WPL as well.”

Shibani Akhtar is hosting the event and she is now giving her welcome note. “The BCCI is confident that the inititation of the Women's Premier League is going to take women's cricket to new heights,” she says before calling on BCCI president Roger Binny, secretary Jay Shah and treasurer Arun Dhuman on stage to unveil the WPL logo.  

The first marquee set to go on the floor includes Harmanpreet Kaur, Smriti Mandhana, Sophie Devine, Ellyse Perry, Ashleigh Gardner and Hayley Matthews. 

The lowest price for capped players is ₹30 lakh, which itself is touted to be more than what most top-tier cricketers make in a season at the WBBL or the Hundred. Even players bought at the minimum base price of ₹10 lakh, which will be the uncapped players, stand to earn as much as one of 17 Grade C female cricketers do in the annual contracting process.

Mallika Sagar will be conducting the auction today. Sagar is a a Mumbai-based art collector and consultant for Modern and Contemporary Indian art, as well as a partner in the Art India Consultants organisation. Notably, Mallika, an experienced auctioneer at Pundoles in Mumbai, recently performed the 2021 Pro Kabaddi League auctions.

2.30pm is when the auction itself is scheduled to start at the Jio World Convention Centre at the Bandra-Kurla Complex in Mumbai. This league has been long due and these players are long overdue the payments of the scale that they are going to see today. It is all simmering nicely in Mumbai as the representatives of the franchises stream in and make themselves comfortable. 

Just the sheer amount of money splashed in the bidding process by franchise owners for teams took the WPL's brand value past those of established women's leagues like the WBBL. A record collective bid of ₹4699.99 crore was garnered from the five team owners, and another ₹951 crore from broadcasting giant Viacom18 for the global television and digital media rights for the first five-year cycle (2023-27). All this is even before a title sponsor has been announced. 

South Africa stars like Marizanne Kapp, Shabnim Ismail and Mignon du Preez have their base price at ₹40 lakh. Their captain and arguably most famous player Dane van Niekerk is even lower in the ₹30 lakh bracket.

A maximum of 90 slots are available. Each team can have between 15 and 18 players. Of these, up to six can be overseas players, so there could be up to 30 non-Indian players who get teams. As stated earlier, 448 players will be going under the hammer. Of those, 269 are from India, and 179 are overseas players, including 19 from Associate teams. There are a total of 202 capped players, and 227 uncapped players, with the 19 Associate players not part of those lists. 29 are from Australia, 31 from England, 23 from the West Indies, 19 from New Zealand, 17 from South Africa, 15 from Sri Lanka, 11 from Zimbabwe, nine each from Bangladesh and Thailand, six from Ireland, four from the UAE, two each from the Netherlands and Scotland, and one each from USA and Hong Kong.

Remember, the top bracket in the auction is ₹50 lakh. The Indians are Harmanpreet Kaur, Smriti Mandhana, Deepti Sharma, Renuka Singh, Jemimah Rodrigues, Shafali Verma, Pooja Vastrakar, Richa Ghosh, Sneh Rana and Meghna Singh. The overseas players in this bracket include Ashleigh Gardner, Ellyse Perry, Meg Lanning, Alyssa Healy, Jess Jonassen and Darcie Brown from Australia; Sophie Ecclestone, Nat Sciver-Brunt, Danni Wyatt and Katherine Sciver-Brunt from England; Sophie Devine from New Zealand; South Africa's Sinalo Jafta; West Indies' Deandra Dottin; and Loryn Phiri of Zimbabwe.

Every single player from the team that the won the inaugural U19 Women's T20 World Cup are in contention at the auction. This includes the reserve players in the team who didn't get to play. Only 10 from the other teams are in contention though: England's Grace Scrivens, New Zealand's Fran Jonas, Ireland's Amy Hunter, Bangladesh's Shorna Akter, Sri Lanka's Vishmi Gunaratne, Zimbabwe's Kelis Ndhlovu, West Indies' Jannillea Glasgow, and Theertha Satish, Mahika Gaur and Vaishnave Mahesh from the UAE. Apart from Scrivens and Akter, everyone else has represented their respective countries at international level

The league is scheduled to run from March 4 to 26 this year. There is no home and away format yet, though. All matches will be played at the Brabourne Stadium in Mumbai or the DY Patil Stadium in Navi Mumbai. A total of 22 matches are set to be played.

The auctions rules doesn't make it mandatory for teams to pick a player from associate nations but there is an incentive for picking one. Teams can field a maximum of four overseas players in their XIs but they have the option of including a fifth overseas player provided she is from an Associate nation.

New Zealand captain Sophie Devine admitted during an interaction with reporters during the ongoing Women's T20 World Cup that it is “naive” to think that the IPL auction is not going to be a distraction. Unlike the IPL, this is not the first women's franchise tournament - England and Australia are among countries have been hosting their own for a number of years, but the fact remains that this is where even the biggest of players are set to get career-high paydays. 

The Women's T20 Challenge might turn into the answer for a trick question a couple of decades later - Which was the first women's T20 league to be hosted by the BCCI? The tournament had three teams with rather generic names Supernovas, Trailblazers and Velocity. Even the name of the tournament itself was rather generic and the only reason fans could feel any affinity for those teams would be the players turning out in their colours. But, the fact remains that the four seasons of the Women's T20 Challenge, coupled with the packed stadiums for women's international matches in the last few years in India, strengthened the case for the WPL to exist and so, credit where it's due. 

As stated earlier, it is quite difficult to predict who could end up fetching a big price tag in these auctions. That doesn't mean we can't try though. There is Smriti Mandhana, Harmanpreet Kaur, Deepti Sharma and Shafali Verma who seem like the best bets among Indians to fetch hefty prices. Shafali is certainly among the candidates for being the most expensive player of the auction. Then there are the stalwarts from Australia - Alyssa Healy, Ellyse Perry, Ashleigh Gardner and Meg Lanning. South Africa's Marizanne Kapp and New Zealand's Amelia Kerr are also players to watch out for. 

The WPL is expected to do for women's cricket what IPL did for men's cricket, the T20 format in particular, since its first season back in 2008. The auction for that was held on February 20, 2008. The players were picked in an eight-round process but each of the teams had selected a marquee Indian player prior to the auction who was then out of the auction process. So Mumbai chose Sachin Tendulkar, Delhi picked Virender Sehwag, Kolkata went for Sourav Ganguly, Bangalore for Rahul Dravid and Punjab for Yuvraj Singh. VVS Laxman, initially named as an icon player for the Deccan Chargers, voluntarily gave up his status to give his team more money to bid for players. Only Rajasthan and Chennai did not have any icon players. After a lukewarm start, with late spin great Shane Warne fetching a bid of $450,000 being the highlight, things changed when India's 2007 T20 World Cup winning captain MS Dhoni's name was pulled out of the bag. CSK bid $1.5 million for him and the rest, as they say, is history. Late Australia all-rounder Andrew Symonds became the most expensive foreign player, being bought by the erstwhile Deccan Chargers for $1.35 million. Younger lot of players like Rohit Sharma, Dinesh Karthik and Ishant Sharma also fetched hefty price tags, with the latter being more expensive than India's pace stalwart Zaheer Khan. A number of players from the Indian U19 team that won the World Cup were also signed on youth contracts. The captain of that side was considered by the Delhi Daredevils but in the end, they decided to go for Pradeep Sangwan as they “didn't want another captain”. It was RCB who went for that player in the end and Virat Kohli would go on to captain that team for eight seasons and become pretty much the face of the IPL.  

A total of 1,525 players registered for the inaugural Women's Premier League Player Auction and the final list was pruned to 409 players.  246 are Indians and 163 are overseas players of which 8 players are from associate nations. The total capped players are 202, uncapped players are 199 and 8 are from associate nations. A maximum of 90 slots are available with the five teams, with 30 being slotted for overseas players.