𝓤𝓷𝓲𝓽𝓮𝓭 𝓝𝓮𝔀𝓼

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James Coles sat in his flat in Hove, curtains drawn, watching TV as his price went up and up. Once the spiralling had stopped, London Spirit had made him the most expensive player in The Hundred, at £390,000 ($524,600) for a month’s work.

“I was pretty relaxed at first but then, as it got higher, I started jumping around on my own while my phone pinged with more and more messages,” the Sussex batter tells The Athletic. “I started off hoping I wouldn’t go too cheaply and ended up in floods of tears.”

Meanwhile Dani Gibson, at that time on the periphery of the England women’s team, suffered from “imposter syndrome” when she tried to get her head around being bought for £190,000, the highest sum paid to any English woman, by Sunrisers Leeds.

“I’d just arrived in South Africa with England and I was watching it in my hotel room,” Gibson told The Hundred Pop-Up. “My team-mates heard my screams. The first person I called was my dad. There were no words from him, just tears. Lots of tears.”

Dani Gibson was bought by Sunrisers Leeds for £190,000 (Ashley Allen/Getty Images)

Welcome to the modern world of the cricket auction, a franchise phenomenon introduced by the biggest and richest competition of them all, The Indian Premier League (IPL), in 2008 and replicated for the first time this year by The Hundred in England.

For context these are sums players — essentially county cricketers — could never have dreamed of, at least not until the dramatic rise of T20 cricket over the last 20 years. It is a different and occasionally random way of recruiting players and one that sees Coles and Gibson, not to mention other well-paid recruits, in far greater focus when the competition begins, under new private ownership, on Tuesday.

No one knows the vagaries of an auction better than Ravi Bopara, the most experienced franchise player in world T20 — and now 100-ball — leagues and a batting all-rounder who has played for more clubs than he can remember. The Athletic counted 27 on top of his 13 Tests, 120 one-day internationals and 38 T20 internationals for England.

“There’s less excitement in the draft system because you know exactly what you’re going to go for and you can kind of tell where you might end up,” Bopara tells The Athletic. “But the anticipation and butterflies in your stomach at an auction are something else. There’s always a chance you’re not going to be picked up at all and that can be tough.

“The worst thing is when your name is called out and nobody puts their padel up. You think: ‘Oh no, come on. Please somebody pick me.’ Then when eventually someone puts it up you just think: ‘Thank God.’ If you get picked up at your base price at least you’re there.”

The Northamptonshire Steelbacks are one of the 27 teams for whom Ravi Bopara has played (Stu Forster/Getty Images)

But, as in the cases of Coles and Gibson, for players who are considered a little below the top international bracket at this stage of their careers, a bidding war at an auction can change their lives and propel them to a completely new level.

“I’ve been on both sides,” says Bopara, whose highest price in an auction was the £310,000 paid for him by Kings XI Punjab in the 2009 IPL. “Once you are picked up it can spiral. It can become a mind game. A club who were trying to wait to get you at the back end have to bid when someone else comes in and then it can go higher and higher. Then for some it can become life changing. It is an amazing feeling when you get picked up for more than you expected.

“But I’ve also remained unsold and, the first and second times that happens, it’s a really bad feeling. I thought I was a wanted cricketer and then all of a sudden no one is bidding for you and it’s difficult. It’s a massive wake up call.

“You’re on the phone to your county coach or whoever you trust, saying: ‘Right, we’ve got to work on a few things to make sure it doesn’t happen again.’ You can either think ‘I’ve got to try to get better’ or you go the other way and lose all confidence. That can happen. I’ve seen it happen to a lot of people.”

The biggest problem Coles, who was picked in the England T20 and ODI squads to face India this month without playing, may have is the increased pressure and expectations that come with a bigger salary than many experienced international players.

“The owners will look at you and think: ‘We need you to perform now’,” says Bopara. “That goes for your team-mates too. Sometimes that can be difficult to deal with.

“If you go for a high price tag you know that eyes are going to be on you and people are talking about you. You know the opposition are talking about you and maybe even your own players are talking about you. You’re expected to perform to that level. If you’re the most expensive player in the league people expect you to be the best player in the league, but it doesn’t always work out like that.

“Sometimes some really good cricketers are not paid what they’re worth just because of how it works out, but once you’ve got a price tag people expect you to deliver. I’ve seen players go for a million quid, perform nowhere near what a million-pound player should do, and then go unsold the following year. It’s like hero to zero.

“You can have an average season after being signed for a lot of money and then everyone writes you off. All of a sudden there’s so much negativity around your name.”

James Coles will be a marked man in The Hundred (Dan Istitene/Getty Images)

The big question is whether, in an ever-changing franchise scene, players actually feel any sense of loyalty and identity with the teams they are signed by, even if it is for big money? Or do they become sporting mercenaries who move on to the next pay cheque?

“I grew up at Essex as a young boy and played for 20 years there,” said Bopara, now 41, who retired this year to become a coach and commentator. “It was my home and family. When you leave there’s tears and all sorts of emotions. When I left Essex I even thought: ‘Do I really want to carry on playing?’ I questioned my future when I made the move to Sussex and, for a while, I actually thought: ‘No, I don’t think I want to play anymore. If I can’t play for Essex I don’t want to play at all’.

“But then I realised I didn’t want to give up cricket, I loved it, and I could still offer so much more. But I decided not to put a white shirt on for anyone else. I gave up red-ball cricket and I didn’t want to play first-class cricket for any other team. I had such an attachment to Essex. But with franchise cricket it’s different.

“What I’ve learnt is nobody’s loyal, and that goes for owners as well as players. Basically if you don’t perform you’re not coming back next year. It doesn’t matter how good a bloke you are, owners want results.

“Unless you’re a young player and they see you as an investment for the future it’s pretty cut throat. If you don’t perform they don’t care about you, they’re not signing you. They will replace you with somebody else and you end up somewhere else. That’s the reality of it.”

It is hardly an environment to foster a sense of belonging that someone like Bopara clearly had for his native Essex.

“If you have a really good season for a franchise club you do get slightly more emotionally attached,” he says. “You think: ‘This is the team I want to play for, for the next however many years, as long as they still want me. I want to be here’. But if you don’t play well it can almost be a mutual thing. Both the player and the team accept that it’s best to move on.”

Ravi Bopara raises his bat after scoring his first Test century in 2009 (Emmanuel Dunand/AFP via Getty Images)

So will those who, like Bopara, spend most of their time in franchises increasingly put the T20 leagues before international cricket?

“That’s a tough question,” adds a man who once scored three centuries in consecutive Test innings for England. “From a player’s point of view there are so many opportunities and so many more chances to play on TV and in the big time now.

“The more leagues there are the more opportunities those guys get. But if you want the highest level of cricket you might argue there should be fewer leagues and more emphasis on international cricket again. As a player I’ve got to say the more opportunities the better. It’s our dream to play and this gives more players the chance to realise those dreams and get paid for something we love doing.

“You don’t have to just play for your country to earn a good living now. You think ‘I’m a franchise player now’ and you plan your moves accordingly.”