What's been unfortunate for Bengaluru, could come as a good news for Mumbai! A senior official from an IPL 2017 franchisee has claimed that the IPL 2017 auction could now take place for the third time in Mumbai.
The IPL auction for the 2008 and 2010 season took place in Mumbai. Logistical reasons are cited behind this probable move.
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"Earlier, the IMG team [event managers] in the last few years would head off to Bengaluru well in advance to start the back-end work. And then you had all the IPL governing council members heading to the city a few days prior to the auction. Having it in Mumbai also helps in keeping the cost under check," the source revealed to CricketNext on Friday.
"Today (Friday) is the last day for the interested players to submit their names to the list and ideally the available names will then be sent to the eight teams by say Monday.
"After that, the franchises will take a few days to prepare their preferred list depending on the kind of players they are looking to rope in and re-send the list to the governing council. Once that is done, the final list of players in the auction will be prepared," the senior IPL franchisee member mentioned.
It is almost confirmed that the auction, which was slated for this Saturday, has been rescheduled to the end of February. While the exact date has not been confirmed as yet, the tentative ones have kept cropping up.
The source says that the IPL auction 2017 will now take place either on February 19 or February 26. NDTV, has meanwhile reported that the auction could take place on February 21.
"Yes, we were earlier said that the auction would take place in the first week of February, but then it had to be delayed for obvious reasons," the official continued.
"But that is okay because we all realise that the BCCI has had other priorities and there is a legitimate reason behind the postponement. We are in touch with CEO Rahul Johri and everything is under control.
"Ideally, it will be the third or fourth Sunday of this month that will see the auction being conducted. Basically, it boils down to either February 19 or 26. It shouldn't stretch to the first week of March as once the players are picked up, contracts and all formalities also need to be formalised between the franchise and the players."
