An auction room rewards whichever skill fits on a highlight reel

Player auctions compress months of judgement into ninety seconds of bidding, and the format itself distorts what gets paid for.

Ninety seconds. That is roughly how long a franchise has to decide whether to keep raising for a player once the bidding opens, and no amount of preparation fully survives contact with a live room.

Auctions are not neutral price-discovery machines, whatever the accountants in the room believe. They have a running order, and the running order is a broadcast product. Marquee names go early because a live television audience needs early drama. Specialists get bundled into later sets when the room is thinner, budgets are committed and several franchises have already spent the money that would have made a rational bid possible. Where a player sits in the schedule can matter as much as how he plays.

The format also punishes anything hard to describe. A death-over bowler is a story: the anchor names him, the graphic shows a number, the room understands. A batter whose value is that he rotates strike under pressure in the middle overs has no single number that reads well on screen, and the person bidding is being watched by owners, fans and the market simultaneously. Bidding into a vacuum of narrative is professionally uncomfortable, so people do not.

Add the retention and purse rules on top. Franchises must fill slots, honour overseas caps, and stay under a ceiling, which means the last third of any auction is a constrained optimisation problem being solved out loud, in real time, by tired people. Bargains happen there. So do panic buys, and the difference is often luck.

What I would change is the transparency of the model, not the theatre. Let franchises submit sealed reserve valuations before the event, publish nothing, but allow an automated bid up to that number when a player passes unsold. It preserves the show and stops good cricketers going unsold because three rooms were simultaneously out of cash.

Nobody will do that either, because the unsold moment is content. A camera cuts to the player's face. It rates.

We built a market where the pricing mechanism doubles as the entertainment, then act surprised that entertainment values win.