Soon after Royal Challengers Bengaluru won their second successive IPL title, their all-rounder Krunal Pandya said the trophy was more or less won at the auction table two seasons ago. For a franchise that always came out with an imbalanced squad in the previous years, at the big auctions held before the 2025 season, they came back from the UAE with a strong, well-balanced team. Although there were doubts around the squad, in successive seasons, RCB have silenced the critics with their performance on the field. While head coach Andy Flower and captain Rajat Patidar have been at the centre of the revival, the arrival of Mo Bobat as the director of cricket is where it all started to change for the franchise. Soon after Bobat came on board, RCB roped in Flowers as coach, then opted for a change in captaincy and revamped their coaching personnel which includes Dinesh Karthik, Omkar Salvi among the likes. Asked about Pandya’s take, Bobat, downplayed it, but attributed the success to having a strong structure in the squad. “I don’t know whether you can win a competition at the auction. I think you can probably lose one at the auction. It’s quite hard to undo things that you then either regret or don’t like about your team structure or even personnel once you’ve got through your first mega auction, and then you’re only dealing with mini auctions in the subsequent years. So I would probably say, in my still fairly limited experience, that I’m not sure you win a competition at the auction, but you can certainly lose one there, and then it gets quite difficult in the mini auction,” Bobat said. ALSO READ | Don’t need coaches driving intensity standards when Virat Kohli is around: Andy Flower Among the critical changes that RCB have made to the make-up of the squad over the last two auctions is going in search of proven, experienced players rather than taking a punt at unknowns. It meant, they had a compact squad at their disposal. “We were clear on what we were trying to build as a squad in terms of team structure. We were quite clear on the attributes and characteristics that we wanted from players. That’s a combination of skill and character. Both of those things are really important. And we got pretty much everything we wanted and more at the auction. So we came out of that auction very happy, like most teams tend to do after an auction, but pretty confident that we could do the things that we wanted to do,” Bobat said. While the franchise has had the likes of Chris Gayle, Tillakaratne Dilshan, AB de Villiers in the past to go with big name Indian players led by Virat Kohli, in terms of overall quality they lagged behind other teams. In each of the 17 seasons, they had holes that they couldn’t hide eventually, but over the last two seasons, they have hardly showed any signs of weakness. And Bobat attributed to having experienced players who have faced all sorts of situations. “It’s obvious when anyone looks at our squad that we’ve massively valued experience across key roles. Andy mentioned some of the names earlier. Having the likes of Virat and Rajat as retentions was a really good start, but then adding players of the calibre of Phil Salt, Tim David, Buvi, Hazlewood, Krunal. These are battle-hardened men, and that’s quite important, I think, in a competition as demanding as the IPL. The games come thick and fast. You’ve got to be able to move on from defeats quite quickly, and you need guys that are really calm under pressure. A huge amount goes into auction prep. You’ve probably seen some of our auction videos and seen some of the detail that we go into. But as I said, I don’t think you win the competition at the auction, but it can make a really big difference,” Bobat said.
RCB’s Mo Babat: Not sure you win IPL at the auction, but you can certainly lose one there
