The Unsold List, the Quiet Net and the Tournament Clock: A Training-Ground Report on Indian Cricket's Labour Market

The light at the left end of the nets had not fully come up. Twenty past seven in the morning, that November dampness that drifts in from behind the stands and settles inside the pads, and a team's first-choice wicketkeeper sitting on an ice box with a cooler strapped to his right wrist and ice on his knee. His face carried a look I have known for four decades — not fatigue, arithmetic. In his place, the gloves in the nets belonged to the reserve keeper who had not played a single match all season, and who was now taking the fourth seamer.

The assistant coach stood with a stopwatch. He was not timing the run-up. He was timing the gap between the ball leaving the hand and reaching the gloves — release-to-glove, average of ten deliveries, across three sets. In the first set the gap sat around the sixteenth of a second; by the third set it had widened. The coach looked at the stopwatch, said nothing, and put it back in his pocket. In the adjacent net a batsman was playing throwdowns, and I noticed he had shortened his backlift against anything short — the bat no longer coming up full, coming up cut.

A team's real condition in a tournament is never decided by the scoreboard; it is decided by three things — the workload of the reserve, the glove of the backup, and the backlift of the batsman. I have kept the notebook open through the follow-on, because endurance leaves better notes than victory, and that morning was writing exactly that note.

The calendar is the coach nobody writes about

Something has changed in Indian cricket over the last few seasons that television will never show. Matches are no longer parts of a tournament; matches are stops inside a logistics chain. Fourteen games, thirty-two days, six cities, four hotels, two charter flights and one train. That number will not be in any scorecard. It will be in the team's travel sheet, which reaches me for three reasons: I stay in the hotels the team stays in, I stand outside the nets where no camera goes, and the logistics staff call me because they know I will never print their names.

In such a calendar, squad size is not a technical decision but an economic one. Big teams carry twenty-five players, small teams eighteen. The twenty-five can field two separate pace attacks in the nets in the last third of a season; the eighteen have to run the same four bowlers again. That difference surfaces in the thirtieth over, when a fast bowler in his third spell takes an extra half-second before releasing.

Then the Impact Player. Introduced from IPL 2026, the rule changes a team's selection logic first and the game second. An all-rounder's price used to be set by how many overs he could bowl; now it is set by which situation he can be swapped into after the toss. The Impact Player did not kill the all-rounder; it stripped him of his middle utility. Previously the batsman at seven bowled two overs and secured his place. Now those two overs go to a specialist, and the man at seven is left with only the bat — and to hold a place with the bat he needs fourteen balls a game, which he never gets.

That entire structure is built each year in the auction room. I have been in every auction since 2026, and I learned there that the auction is not a sporting event but a labour-market document. It has two lists. The first runs on the screen — sold names, rising bids, the auctioneer's shout. The second never reaches a camera — the unsold list, which leaves the room and is buried next morning in three lines on an inside page.

I learned to read the second list in February 2026, Mumbai, the first IPL auction: a US$5 million purse per franchise, seventeen-man squads, agents in the hotel corridor. I filed the numbers, then spent the season inside the Mumbai Indians setup — nets, team bus, hotel breakfast — watching Abhishek Nayar, a Ranji all-rounder handed a contract, while three of his dressing-room team-mates went unsold and went home. Since then I keep a second list at every auction. The auction room taught me to watch the unsold man's silence, not the winning bid.

The unsold list is an economic document

November 2026, Jeddah. The IPL mega auction, a purse of ₹120 crore per team, two days, more than fourteen hundred names registered and hundreds unsold. I was in the room when Prithvi Shaw's name came up at a base price of ₹75 lakh and drew no bid. Television made it a sensation. Inside the room it was not a sensation; it was a very cold calculation.

The auction room does not buy the man who is best; it buys the man who can be replaced most cheaply. The franchise's real question is not how much talent a player has. It is: if he breaks down tomorrow, who covers him and at what price? A player whose backup already exists cheaply in the squad sees his value fall — even if he is the most gifted batsman in the country.

So the unsold list is not a rejection list. It is a redundancy list, and it holds three kinds of names. First, the specialist whose specialism the team already owns twice. Second, the mid-career player with four thousand first-class runs, no clean label as finisher or anchor, dismissed by franchises as 'backup at seven'. Third, the young player with no tape — no viral clip, no saleable name, no agent in the room.

The second category is the largest and the most interesting. The biggest unorganised group in Indian cricket is the player who is too good for domestic cricket and not required for franchise cricket. He is not bought, he does not retire, he does not protest. He registers again next season, goes unsold again, and is the first to arrive at the pre-season conditioning camp in July.

The largest attendance of unsold players, in my experience across three cities and three seasons, is at the net where there is no camera. A fortnight after the auction, when the camp begins, the unsold men are often there — not invited, simply arriving with their state coach, standing at the edge, bowling four overs if someone offers. Nobody writes their names. My notebook does. My notebook is a rhythm section: it marks who kept time when the scoreboard lost its voice.

The training ground is a clock made of people

I do not watch a training ground as a place. I watch it as a clock, and I listen for the beat. It has three parts, and they run at different speeds.

Rhythm first. In a team going well, the gap between deliveries in the nets stays constant. When the team is tired, the gap widens — four seconds to six, six to nine. It is the cheapest indicator available and the least used. Last season I watched the gap roughly double in a team's nets in the third week, and in the same week that team lost two matches in the final over. Nobody joined those two facts.

Second, the glove. The reserve keeper standing in the nets is a signal, and not always a good one. If the first-choice keeper has spent three straight days on an ice box and is still playing matches, the team is resting him on the field rather than in the nets — which means the management knows he is not fully fit but does not fully trust his replacement either. That is a team managing an injury by concealment. I have seen it four times; each time the player was out within three weeks.

Third, the backlift. March 2026, Eden Gardens. The week before that Test I had watched VVS Laxman in the nets and written that he had shortened his backlift against anything short. India followed on 274 behind; Laxman was pushed to No. 3 and made 281, Rahul Dravid made 180, and India won by 171 runs. My match report opened not with the toss but with a net session three days earlier. After that I stopped starting with the toss and started with grip, guard, footwork. Editors began sending me on tour instead of keeping me in the press box.

A shortened backlift is never a technical improvement; it is a body's insurance claim — the batsman telling himself he will not take the risk against pace. When three batsmen in the same team do it in one net session, the scoreboard will show fewer runs than expected, and the reason will not be on the scoreboard. In that November net I saw three batsmen of three different ages produce the same reaction against the short ball. It was not coincidence. It was the calendar answering back.

The last twenty minutes

I read the five-substitution debate in football through a cricket lens, because the economics is identical. Deep squads use the rule to turn the final twenty minutes not into fatigue but into attrition. In cricket those are the last five overs. Teams with six specialist bowlers consistently posted better death economy than teams with four, and the gap opened between the seventeenth and twentieth overs, where a tired bowler loses the yorker and becomes a length bowler. That is not a skill gap. It is a replaceability gap.

Tournament cricket is won by the team with a fourth and fifth option, not the team with the best first option. The same logic that governs the auction table governs the net. But there is an arithmetic nobody prints: if you buy a fourth option, you must also bowl him, and bowling him means taking overs from the first option. Under tournament pressure captains do not do it. They give the seventeenth over to the first option, keep the fourth on the bench, and discover in the final week that he has not bowled in three weeks. Several teams showed that pattern this season.

From this comes what I call the zero of the seventh man. Across the season I counted: several teams' No. 7 batsman bowled fewer than two overs in the entire tournament, while the same player bowls four to six overs every match in domestic cricket. An all-rounder is loneliest when the team does not need both his skills at once.

2026 and today are not the same silence

When the nets went quiet in 2026, I learned that silence can be a kind of evidence. In May 2026 three Rajasthan Royals players were arrested in the spot-fixing case, and in the weeks after, the loudest room was the television studio and the quietest was the dressing room. That year I made a rule: when everyone is talking, call the man who did not.

Today's silence is different and I will not treat it as the same. The nets are not quiet because something is hidden; they are quiet because the coverage has left. Ranji Trophy matches outside the knockouts draw no camera. A January match at four degrees with forty people in the stands has no corporate box and therefore no broadcast. That is not conspiracy. What is not covered does not disappear; it drops out of the record — and in Indian cricket, dropping out of the record is the largest career cost there is, because selection follows the record that is visible. Mumbai won the Ranji Trophy in 2026-24 — their 42nd title, under Ajinkya Rahane — and the more revealing story is how many of that squad were bought at the next auction. I keep both lists together. Read apart, they flatter; read together, they indict.

The misreading from outside

Two readings arrive from outside, both convenient. The first: money is ruining the game. I have heard it two thousand times, usually from men who never drew the money. Money is not ruining the game; it is reordering the priorities inside it, and the order is now set by the auction ledger rather than the Ranji ledger.

The second: the unsold man is the real story. That is my own favourite sentence, which makes it the most dangerous one. I publish it when three independent observed details point the same way — not when one unsold name has moved me. This season there were three: the rising share of mid-career players on the unsold list; the fact that several of them then led the domestic season in runs; and the fact that the teams that rotated most in the tournament looked most unstable at the end.

The real inversion is this: the auction's error is not that it picks the wrong people; it is that it places the right people in a role it no longer needs. The team wanted a batsman at seven; the auction gave it a batsman at seven who could also bowl two overs — and the Impact Player made those two overs redundant. The player did not change. The meaning of his role did.

And the outside reader's second mistake is calling the final week a question of form. It is role erosion. A team that never plays its sixth and seventh options for a whole season discovers in the last week that those bodies are not at season level, and the television calls it poor form. I should disclose that I am not outside this room. I drink tea with the officials whose policies I audit and I take calls from the coaches whose selection errors I count. The man who helped me most is the man I have had to write about most sharply. I still meet him.

Forward

At the next auction I will not watch the bids. I will watch three numbers: how many unsold players averaged above forty in the domestic season; how many teams give their fourth seamer more than four matches in the first three weeks; and how many reports are filed from January Ranji matches with no star in them. The third is the hardest and the most honest indicator. The auction lights go off, the room empties, the agents gather their phones, and what remains is the net — a reserve keeper's glove, the widening gap on a stopwatch, a shortened backlift. The question is not who wins next season. It is how many balls the man who must bowl the last one will have bowled in the six months before it.