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AUCTION

My Experience at the DLF IPL 2008 Player Auction

by RICHARD “The Hammer Man” MADLEY.

In early February 2008, I received an interesting email from an old school friend about a possible auctioneering job
in India: the BCCI was founding a new Twenty20 cricket league. I am a lifelong cricket lover and remain a dedicated
wicketkeeper-batsman for the Maycock Village Cricket Club in the Wiltshire League Division 7, so the email certainly

caught my attention.

A few weeks later I found myself and my trusty gavel on a flight from London to Mumbai. It was an assignment that has
proved to be one of the undoubted highlights of my professional career.

As an auctioneer with 30 years experience of selling paintings and antiques, I have had plenty of interesting moments in
my career. I have sold dozens of paintings for over $1,000,000 each, and worked in auction houses from London to New York to
Toronto, but until last year I had never sold cricketers before!

The trip to India (my first to the country) was in many ways a journey into the unknown. Auctions that I had conducted
in the past had received some media interest, but nothing prepared me for what I would face in Mumbai. Of course I had
heard that cricket was “like a religion” in India, and was aware of the new glamour that the combination of Business and
Bollywood had already brought to the IPL…. but the attention that the auction received that week was beyond anything
I could have ever imagined.

Although I had had detailed briefings from the IPL team, there was certainly a lot of nerves on my part as I stepped up to the
rostrom for the first time. There had been no precedent to the IPL player auction. The feeling I felt was very similar to how a
batsman feels as he takes guard at the start of his innings. However once the first player (Shoaib Akthar) was “sold”, the
auction went by incredibly quickly and I loved every minute. Sold in several “sets”, and lasting from 11am until around
6pm, it was probably the longest day’s auctioneering I have ever done, but without doubt the most exciting. As a wicketkeeper
myself, I think the most thrilling player to sell was Mahendra Singh Dhoni. The fact that he received the highest bid ($1.5m
from Chennai Super Kings) was the icing on the cake. The next day I received dozens of phone calls and texts from friends in
the UK, Australia, South Africa, The USA and the West Indies to say they had seen me on television – which is certainly
beyond the type of coverage my auctions normally receive! The Indian press also coined a nickname for me that has stuck in
some circles – “The Hammer Man”.

Over a year on from that day in the Oberoi ballroom, I am still asked about the IPL auction wherever I go. It is fantastic for
me to look back upon being part of a historic occasion for sport – no sports league has ever had an auction system to allocate

its players before, and I am proud to have been involved. It was fantastic to return to India for the inaugural IPL match in
Bangalore and see Brendon McCullum (a player I sold!) hit the highest ever Twenty20 score.

As a cricket fan I think that the IPL has been superb for the game of cricket, and I will treasure forever the memory of being
involved in such an important part of building the League. The auction was definitely one of the pinnacles of my career,
and as a cricket fan I will enjoy continuing to watch this magnificent competition over the coming years.

Richard Madley, Auctioneer

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