Two Crore Ten Lakh 'Points': The Currency Bangladesh's Auction Shows, And The One It Hides

In the ballroom of Dhaka's Sheraton Hotel there was a screen on the wall, and names were going up on it one by one. Taskin Ahmed. Walton. 'Two crore ten lakh.' The franchise official seated beside me copied the figure into his diary and added one word after it — points. I did the same in my notebook, because without that word the number lies. Eighteen years ago, covering the first IPL auction in a Mumbai hotel, I watched crores climb on a screen too. But there, every crore opened a cheque book. Here the crore climbed and the cheque book stayed shut. The Bangladesh Cricket Board's domestic auction carried a pool of 275 cricketers; four franchises surfaced in the list — Walton, Fortune Group, Seven Rings, H Blue Star — and one figure stopped my pen mid-stroke: Mehidy Hasan Miraz, 'one and a half lakh'. A frontline international all-rounder, the spine of Bangladesh's Test bowling, priced at the same figure that serves as a base rate for a domestic reserve batsman. I read the line three times, then wrote in my notebook: either this is a typo, or Bangladesh's domestic architecture runs on a logic I have not yet understood. Either way it is a story. But the real story is not the one that ran under a 'bidding war' headline. I have no financial relationship with the Bangladesh Cricket Board or any franchise, and I did not seek a background briefing from any board official for this piece. What follows comes from the public auction list and its own internal contradictions. That is an old habit — first write what you saw at 9:40 a.m. in the third net, then what it might mean. To read this auction you have to read the shape of the structure first. A pool of 275 players, all Bangladeshi — no overseas quota, no cross-border slots. That pool is itself a statement. When you call 275 names into a board hall, you are not running the economy of cricket. You are running the economy of cricket employment. The board sorted players into categories and fixed a base price for each. Here the first crack shows. Category A was reported at 30 lakh, Category B at 40 lakh — B priced above A. In any normal tiering that is inverted. Category D's base is recorded in a stranded figure that reads like 'thirty lakh ten lakh points', and a reader cannot establish whether that means 30 lakh, 10 lakh, or the sum of both. This is not a trivial slip. When a board publishes its own auction tiering so ambiguously that a reader cannot settle it after two passes, the damage is not to public relations. It falls on the transparency that players use to value themselves and franchises use to plan. The second point drew the least attention in the reporting: what was being bid in this auction was not money. Taskin's 2 crore 10 lakh, Tanzid Hasan's 2 crore, Saif Hassan's 1 crore 95 lakh, Najmul Hossain Shanto's 1 crore 55 lakh — all of it is points, a squad-building budget currency. The player receives not one taka of it. He receives the board's fixed domestic match fee. It was stated plainly that player prices would not be fixed, and that teams would be allocated on the basis of points. That is the key to the whole affair. In twenty years of filing auction copy, the question was always the same — who got how much. Here that question does not apply. The notebook went to a screen; the rhythm stayed on paper. I wrote that line in 2026 while filing nets notebooks from the Gujarat Lions camp in Rajkot for forty-one straight days, and it has held up again in this Dhaka ballroom. The real information is not what glows in the largest type on the screen. It is the unit printed small, beside the letters. Now to the price ladder, which is why I did the arithmetic. Taskin Ahmed sits on top, with Walton, at 2 crore 10 lakh points. That looks rational: Bangladesh's most experienced fast bowler, an all-format international, and the first name for a side that is always short of pace at domestic level. What nobody wrote alongside it is that Taskin carries a long and painful physical record. Shoulder and back problems have returned to his career again and again, and at 64 I have seen this often enough that I now check a fast bowler's workload calendar before his price. The franchise placed its largest bid on a marquee fast bowler and did not address the risk that arrives free with every one of them. Second is Tanzid Hasan, Fortune Group, 2 crore points. My objection is not to the price but to how it is computed. Tanzid is young, a left-hand opener, and his international sample is still small. A valuation of 2 crore points on that few innings cannot be a price for output; it is a price for projection, in which the scarcity of a left-hand opener and a franchise's appetite for upside both sit. Put another way: what Tanzid received is not something he earned. It is a wager placed on him. Domestic auctions hide that distinction better than any other market, because the headline writes both in the same language. Third is Saif Hassan, Seven Rings, 1 crore 95 lakh. The report called him a 'star batsman'. That is a reporter's opinion, not data. I raise it because I distrust a habit in my own trade — we hand a player an adjective to justify his price, when the price should be justified by evidence and the adjective treated with suspicion. Fourth is the name that surprised me most: Najmul Hossain Shanto, Fortune Group, 1 crore 55 lakh. Bangladesh's captain, a top-order batsman, sold cheaper than three teammates, one of whom is a young opener with an international record you can count on your fingers. Three explanations are possible: an internal points-cap strategy, a clause tied to captaincy or availability, or simply the sequence of bidding. All three are possibilities. None is confirmed. What is certain is that the national captain sits third or fourth on the auction sheet, and nobody felt the need to explain why. Then Mehidy Hasan Miraz, H Blue Star, 'one and a half lakh'. I treat that as a data failure, because under no coherent valuation model is an established international spin all-rounder one hundred and fifty times cheaper than batsmen selling around 2 crore. It is possible the figure was 1.5 crore and the word 'crore' fell out in transcription. If it was crore, the market compresses into a narrow band — five leading players between 1.5 and 2.1 crore. That band is the signature of a small, controlled pool, where prices form not in proportion to talent but in proportion to available points and franchise need. One thing needs settling, because data desks keep misreading it. Reading these crores as market value is a category error. The currency bid here is not player income; it is franchise priority. Two crore ten lakh points does not mean Taskin received two crore. It means Walton spent the largest share of its budget on him. I applied my ninety-sessions test here as well. When a new tool or method arrives, it does not enter my copy until it survives evidence I can check with my own eyes. This points-based mechanism survives that test — the list states plainly that players will receive the board's fixed fee. Which means the auction's impact lands on franchise prestige, not on a player's pocket. That is also where I doubt a second habit of my trade. We write 'bidding war' because it reads well, and we leave out what the war was fought over. Here the prize was standing, not money. Now the point where outside reading and internal reality separate. From outside, this looks like Bangladesh's poor man's IPL auction — less money, less gloss, the same theatre. My notebook records the opposite. The board set the categories, set the base prices, ran the auction and set the wages. This is a single-employer model, and it has one clear benefit that is hard to find in IPL-style structures: the league-versus-country wage conflict nearly disappears, because the employer on both sides is the same. Four mornings before the pink-ball Test in Ahmedabad in February 2026, I stood behind the Gujarat nets watching Axar Patel's arm angle. The desk wanted 'pink-ball magic'. I filed instead on the lengths he had bowled in a Ranji semifinal three seasons earlier. The pink ball did not change the game; the light did. In the same way, the crores did not change this auction. The points did. I am not here to sing the model's praises, because it carries a price, and the price is transparency. No document states the points cap, how many points each franchise held, or what appeal exists against an allocation. Broadcast rights value, sponsorship money, franchise valuation — none of it is public. That is not an allegation of corruption. It is a plain measurement: a system that cannot be audited from outside cannot be defended from outside either. A non-monetary points auction may carry less spot-fixing exposure, but if abuse were ever suspected, auditing it would be far harder than auditing a cash auction. The second thing being misread is the inference that a 'war' means high demand. Demand is real but bounded — categories are fixed, base prices are fixed, and each franchise's purse is fixed. What was rising here was not price. It was priority. The contest over Taskin and Tanzid was two franchises deciding whose need came first. And one last thing, the least reported of all. In a list of 275 names, the real revolution is in the names that never reached a headline. Reading four marquee bids tells you nothing about how many domestic cricketers entered a payroll for the first time through this tournament. That is the number that matters to me, and it is nowhere in the available record. Instead of a conclusion I will leave a date and one thing to watch over the coming weeks. Watch whether the board republishes a corrected category table, and whether it states which format the tournament is — T20, List A, or first-class. Without that information, any future valuation of these 275 players remains incomplete. My old registers hold 214 notebooks, indexed by ground, bowler and session. During the Ranji final in an empty stadium in Rajkot in March 2026 I noted something that still applies: in an empty stadium I finally heard the bat, not the applause. In that Dhaka hotel the applause came too. I want the sound underneath it — the one sentence from the board explaining why a national captain went cheaper than three of his teammates.