RCB underbid for MS Dhoni in the 2008 auction: Former IPL auctioneer Richard Madley

Richard Madley has been one of the Indian Premier League’s most popular faces over the years, with the prolific auctioneer and his gavel grabbing a lot of attraction in the Indian media. With his father and father-in-law being an auctioneer, he started as a floor sweeper in various auction halls and slowly worked his way up to become one of IPL’s most pivotal faces.

Madley has been the auctioneer at the IPL from the outset, until 2019, serving the league for 11 years. He was later replaced by Hugh Edmeades, a fellow Britisher of Madley with great experience in fine-arts auctioneering. He has previously expressed his disappointment having been sacked out of the blue, despite serving the tournament so well.

In an interview recently with The Sports Doyen, he showed a bidding pad from the first-ever IPL auction, which belonged to the Royal Challengers Bangalore, who were yet to be named back then. Madley said that he was given the nickname hammerman on that day and revealed a very interesting detail later on.

“This is the same bidding pad RCB used in the first-ever auction (Showing the pad on the screen) and they were named Bengaluru back then because the official names of the franchises weren’t finalized as yet. With this very bidding pad, RCB underbid for MS Dhoni in the 2008 auction, quite regretfully I must say,” he said.

One can only imagine how different the IPL landscape would’ve had RCB grabbed the chance to buy MS Dhoni.

Here’s the video where he talked about it:

RCB releases 10 players for the 2021 auction

Royal Challengers Bangalore have released 10 players from their side, which includes some big names like, Aaron Finch, Dale Steyn, Moeen Ali and Chris Morris. They also let go of the services of Shivam Dube, Gurkeerat Singh, Pawan Negi, Parthiv Patel (Retired), Isuru Udana and Umesh Yadav.

Quite interestingly, they decided to retain the services of Josh Philippe and Kane Richardson, who didn’t feature an awful lot in the 2020 edition. However, it seems clear that RCB are going to make some significant changes to their side in a bid to challenge for the title and further improve their 4th position finish in 2020.

The auction is likely to take place in the third week of the coming month, with February 18th being touted as a potential date.