RCB’s Director of Cricket Mo Bobat on what influences player retentions or releases ahead of an IPL auction

RCB’s newly appointed Director of Cricket, Mo Bobat, explained the rationale behind how the franchise plans for retaining and releasing players, a collective decision that depends on multiple factors such as purse size, and talent versatility.

On a pre-auction edition of RCB Bold Diaries, Bobat particularly stressed on how the wavering fortunes dictated by a player auction influences decision making by the management. He said, “Once you’ve done your gap analysis of how you want to play and what resources you have internally, you then have to make some pretty difficult decisions around who you want to retain and release.”

Speaking on the topic of surging player prices, Bobat added, “In the back of your mind, you are thinking about how much purse you want to have at the auction because you want to be able to build for the real high value players and we know that the auction can get really competitive and at times values can rise pretty quickly and out of control so you need to feel like you've got the capability to go for some of those big players.”

Finally, the Englishman also re-iterated how the combination of opposition strengths and the behaviour of playing surfaces also have a say in putting across a question around building a squad.

Bobat said, “In constructing the squad, ultimately you want as many options as possible so it's important for myself, Andy (Flower) and Faf (du Plessis) to try and plan and think about how we how we can do some business at the auction with a decent purse size that gives us as much tactical flexibility as possible going into the competition so that we can deal with the different pitches and surface and scenarios, the different opposition lineups - all of those things a little bit of flexibility so understanding the structure of your team and what is available to our auction, how much money you’ve got to put towards that it is a really intriguing problem to solve.”