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. 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.

MS Dhoni was the biggest name to enter the IPL 2008 auction. Having led Team India to a win in the T20 World Cup just a year ago, Dhoni could have been an automatic pick had a team from his hometown been part of the league. Since that wasn't the case, Dhoni entered the auction and unsurprisingly emerged as the costliest pick when Chennai Super Kings (CSK) shelled out USD 1.5 million.

The Yellow Army faced stiff competition from Mumbai Indians (MI), who had to back out towards the end due to less money in the purse. CSK and MI weren't the only teams to bid for Dhoni.

Back then, RCB had picked Rahul Dravid as their icon player, which was, of course, one of the reasons why they couldn't sign Dhoni.

The 8 IPL franchises were allowed to pick one icon payer before the auction. As per the rules, the icon player had to be paid 10 percent extra money than the highest-paid player in his franchise. This was probably the reason why MI also missed out on signing Dhoni.

CSK had decided against picking a marquee player and hence, they had enough money in the purse.

The biggest player in the history of CSK, Dhoni has always been their first-choice retained player. Interestingly, Dhoni has led CSK in every game he has represented them in IPL.

As captain, Dhoni has captained the Yellow Army to 119 wins in 197 matches. CSK have won 3 IPL titles under him and have made it to the second round in 10 out of 11 seasons so far.

Tags :Richard MadleyRoyal Challengers BangaloreMahendra Singh Dhoni