It was quite an auction to remember for the Royal Challenger Bengaluru as they landed a brilliant combination of youngsters and seasoned campaigners, a potpourri of dynamic foreigners and exciting Indians, a mélange of some proven talents and a rising bunch of individuals. RCB’s cricketing director, Mo Bobat played a very special part in defining the picks for the upcoming year.

In an exclusive interview with ESPNCricinfo, Bobat revealed what were the plans which went behind the picks by RCB in the auction room in Jeddah while also underlining that it wasn’t about landing big names but monikers who can get the job done for RCB.

Highlighting the areas which RCB wanted to address in the auction, following the miraculous turnaround in the last season, Bobat said, “We want to win the IPL, that's what we are here for. RCB has a somewhat unique background in that for a team that has quite a big status, we obviously haven't won the competition, and it ends up being a narrative that plays out a lot. One of the reasons I came to RCB was, I'm excited by that challenge. I'm certainly not daunted by it. The same is true for Andy. There's a fine line between being excited by that challenge and making sure you're not obsessed by it. I think if we get obsessed by that, it ends up being an additional pressure.”

He further added, “What I want us to be obsessed with is how we are going to play our cricket. Some of the ingredients that we think are going to help us to deliver on all of that - and this came across in some of the things we shared around the auction - was that we wanted to develop a strong Indian core to our team.”

Also highlighting the key difference in the Indian core from the last season, Bobat said, “If you look at just our Indian players, a big proportion of our IPL caps were sat in two players - in Virat and DK [Dinesh Karthik, now retired]. And it's brilliant to have guys of that level of experience, but we wanted to even that out slightly and have more Indian players with experience, and preferably leadership experience as well, to strengthen that core.”

He concluded by saying, “We started with retaining three Indian players, which I don't think RCB has ever done before. Another thing was - and a few teams clearly had this mantra - trying to spend money on our starters [playing XI] and trying to make sure that you have high quality on the field. That might mean slightly smaller squads. It might mean not quite as much experience on the bench. So if we spent big money on top-order batters like RCB may have done in the past, we might not have achieved that Indian core, we might not have achieved the balance and variety, and we might not have strengthened our bowling attack enough.”