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By Peter Della Penna

The Northern California Cricket Association’s July 4th weekend Twenty20 tournament will be taking on a new look this year with the implementation of an IPL-style player auction. Arjun Thyagarajan, the North West Region batsman who has been taking the lead in organizing this year’s event, is pleased with the amount of interest shown this year as more than 200 players have signed up to be a part of the auction process.

“We had this tournament last year and I was part of the organizing committee. I’ve been part of the LA Open. I’ve seen what happens in these kinds of tournaments,” said Thyagarajan. “Of all the teams that are entering the competition, three or four teams tend to be really strong because everyone wants to play for a good team and you have contacts and things like that. The other teams in the competition end up being weak teams. It’s not really fun going into a competition with four strong teams and four weak teams.”

In last year’s NCCA tournament, which was called the USA Independence TANA Cup 20/20, Thyagarajan was part of the DreamCricket Fooglies which romped through to the final, largely as a result of having a stacked lineup that included several current or former USA national team players including his brother Aditya Thyagarajan, Sushil Nadkarni, Aditya Mishra and Ritesh Kadu as well as regional stars Samarth Shah, James Crosthwaite, Nikhil Iyer, Vijay Beniwal and Karnataka player NC Aiyappa.

Thyagarajan feels that having an auction this year will help balance the playing field and make it a much more exciting and competitive tournament. The number of teams has also been trimmed from eight to six which should also help to eliminate the lopsidedness of some matches.

“My concept really this year was to figure out a way to reduce the teams to six and to have the best six players in the country playing in that,” said Thyagarajan. “That way you have an even playing field among all teams. The only way that’s possible really is to have some kind of an auction system where you have a pool of players and you can pick the players.”

Each of the six teams has a team owner responsible for drafting a squad with a cap of $10,000 virtual dollars. As part of the scheme to build squads, the tournament committee identified icon players and each team could have up to four such players assigned before the start of the auction to become the core of the team. Icon players were automatically assigned a value of $1000 against the team cap.

The list of icon players was published on Wednesday and includes Nauman Mustafa and Srinivasa Raghavan for the CSZ Titans, Mishra and Shantanu Divekar for the Fooglies, Rishi Bhardwaj and Pranay Suri of the Stanford Supernovas and Shiva Vashishat and Saqib Saleem of the Cloudalyze Spinners. In all, 22 players were designated as icon players.

Non-icon players are divided into two subsets for the auction – representative and club players. Representative players are defined as having played for a league team in an interleague tournament or a regional team in a USACA tournament within the last three years and have a starting bid of $200. All other players are listed as club players and have a starting bid of $100. Raises in the bidding will be in $25 increments.

San Jose’s Kaama Lounge, one of the tournament sponsors, will be hosting the live player auction on June 9 at 6 p.m. PST. The auction will be streamed live on the tournament web site, www.nccat20.com.

As of Wednesday, there are roughly 50 players in the representative pool and 150 in the club pool. While the majority of players are from the Bay Area, double-digit signups have come in from Los Angeles and Seattle. With 22 of the 84 roster places already taken by icon players, just 62 players from the overall auction pool of 200 will wind up with teams.

The six teams will be split into two groups of three with round-robin matches to be played on July 2 and 3 at Santa Clara Cricket Ground. The semifinals and final will be played on July 4 at the same venue and all matches will be streamed live on the tournament web site. Last year’s 4th of July NCCA Twenty20 tournament winner, the San Francisco Blasters, took home a $3000 prize. This year’s prize pool is currently $5000, but organizers are hoping to get more sponsors, including a title sponsor, to get the first place prize up to $10,000.

“What this tournament is really providing is no politics, no administrators. Team owners buy players for what they’re worth,” said Thyagarajan. “What [players] like about this is if a player really thinks he is worth x amount, he will sign up and hope that he’s bought for that. If you’re not, then I guess team owners didn’t really want you.”