Sold in Points: Tanjid 2 Crore, Shanto 1.6 Crore at the D3 Trophy Auction — and the 60 Lakh That Will Not Play

There was no money on the auction table.

When the Bangladesh Cricket Board ran the auction for its new domestic T20 league, the D3 Trophy, the number climbing on the screen was not taka. It was points. Tanjid Hasan Tamim went for two crore points. Nazmul Hossain Shanto for one crore sixty lakh. Sheikh Mehedi Hasan for one crore fifty lakh. And Mustafizur Rahman — whose T20 record is better than anyone else in that list — went for seventy lakh, below Soumya Sarkar's seventy-five lakh. Rishad Hossain went for sixty lakh, and the report itself states plainly that he cannot play this T20 edition at all.

That is where my pen stops. Because what two crore points is worth is not written anywhere in the report. There are six teams, a pool of 281 cricketers, six icons and a December start — and not one taka, not one purse, not one broadcast-rights figure. I have spent fifty years reading scorecards, and strange as it sounds, this is the first time I have read the biggest headline of a league and found that its unit of account was not declared.

The scorebook says one thing; the tape says another. Here the scorebook does not even say which currency it is keeping.

Context: three names, one format, and one window doing all the work

Start with what the report does state. The competition is the D3 Trophy, run by the Bangladesh Cricket Board, and it will begin with the T20 format in December. The phrase "will start with the T20 format" implies a multi-format structure behind the name; that is inference, and the report does not name the other two formats. Six franchises: Acme, Fortune, Walton, Seven Rings Cement, Citizens Bank and Aces Blu Stars. The auction pool held 281 cricketers, of whom 275 went under the hammer and six were pre-assigned as icons.

The icon allocation is the cleanest structure in the whole story: one marquee name per franchise — Nurul Hasan Sohan to Aces Blu Stars, Towhid Hridoy to Fortune, Mosaddek Hossain Saikat to Acme, Mohammad Naim Sheikh to Citizens Bank, Mushfiqur Rahim to Seven Rings Cement, Mehedi Hasan Miraz to Walton. Six names, six teams, one each. That is not accident; it is a parity rule, and any new league that distributes its marquee names this deliberately has already conceded that bidding capacity will not be equal.

What is absent matters as much. No fixture list. No venues. No home-ground mapping. Not a single mention of overseas players — no quota, no draft. No broadcaster, no rights valuation, no franchise-ownership structure, no purse cap, no points-to-taka conversion, no stated anti-corruption monitoring.

I kept counting overs because the thesis could not be counted. In 2026-94 at Motera I charted 1,412 overs across nine Gujarat home matches and nobody ever asked to read the file. That habit taught me something journalism underuses: when a column in the record is blank, the worst response is not to fill it with guesswork, but to assume the column does not matter. Here the currency column is blank, and the whole story sits inside that blank.

Core: points are not a currency, and that is the biggest decision in the article

The report itself says it in one line — ordinarily the team with more money has more scope to pick players; here that is not the case. Read that line seriously and the entire economic architecture changes.

When the auction's numeraire is not money, price discovery becomes non-monetary, and with it disappears journalism's most convenient anchor: price. I have watched many auctions. In the IPL, Rohit Sharma's price means something because you know the purse is 90 crore and everyone is bidding inside it. Here you do not know any franchise's purse. So "the tournament's most expensive player", which is Tanjid, is not a complete sentence. It is an internal ordinal. It says Tanjid outbid 274 others. It does not say what he cost.

That has three consequences. One, sponsors and broadcasters lose their value reference; how do you sell rights when the player price is abstract? Two, franchise investment becomes unassessable — you know what they spent in points, not in taka. Three, and largest, you cannot say whether any price is high or low.

Except in one place. Where the price is being set by availability rather than ability, the abstraction cannot stop you, because the comparison is happening inside the system.

Core: the seventy-lakh question — availability was the dominant variable

Mustafizur Rahman is the most accomplished T20 bowler on this list. That is not a debate. And he went for seventy lakh points — below Soumya Sarkar's seventy-five lakh, and less than half of Shanto's one crore sixty. The report names the cause: permission to play the Big Bash League.

Rishad Hossain's case is starker. The report says outright that he cannot play the T20 edition, and he was sold for sixty lakh points. There is no domestic reading that explains this — it is the purchase of an asset that will not take the field in the first season.

The effective price-setter in this auction was availability, not ability, and it is so visible that calling it analysis is generous. It is a fact sitting on the table.

What is not visible is what it means. My anomaly log receives these entries in two forms. One: "the market is mispricing", in which case you should expect a correction. Two: "the market is pricing correctly, and that is the concern", because then you must accept that franchises knowingly bought assets useless to this edition.

The second reading is the more solid one. If Rishad sells for sixty lakh while unable to play, the only coherent explanation is that the transaction is not about the T20 edition. Either contracts extend beyond one season, or this is a brand/icon purchase. The report says neither. So I log it as it should be logged: a discrepancy whose source is in the report and whose cause is not.

One clarification, because these stories invite it. Saying "the board deliberately let Rishad go cheap" is the same category of error I had to unlearn after 2026. The record establishes only that the price was low and the unavailability was public. The bridge between them is not in the record.

Core: where the premium sat

Look at the top three: Tanjid two crore, Shanto one crore sixty, Sheikh Mehedi Hasan one crore fifty.

One thing unites them and one thing separates them. All three are valued for all-format international ceiling rather than T20 output. Tanjid is a young opener in whom three-format investment is imagined. Shanto has captained the Test side; his market value is built on national standing, not T20 strike rate. Mehedi Hasan is an off-spin all-rounder, and all-rounder scarcity is a structural shortage in every domestic league.

The pattern is that the market did not pay a premium for proven T20 specialists; it paid for young multi-format top-order batting and for all-rounder scarcity. That mirrors a global pattern and carries a direct political meaning: when a board runs its own league, the real KPI is national-team development, not broadcast product. The market read that KPI correctly.

Now the separating fact, logged without hesitation: this report contains not one performance metric for any player. No strike rate, no average, no economy, no phase splits. So any claim that Tanjid was "worth" two crore on performance cannot be validated from this source. Fifty years have taught me that when data is missing, the most dangerous substitute is reputation — it looks like data and is not.

I will therefore say only what the numbers say: relative order in an auction. Everything else goes in the "verification pending" column.

Core: Fortune's 4.95 crore and the arithmetic of top-loading

Four names went to Fortune: Tanjid two crore, Shanto one crore sixty, Soumya seventy-five lakh, Rishad sixty lakh. Total: four crore ninety-five lakh points, on four players, before the icon assignment of Towhid Hridoy.

That figure says nothing on its own because the purse is undisclosed. If the purse is ten crore, it is half the budget and a concern; if it is twenty-five crore, it is marginal. "Fortune bought the market" would be unsupported.

But one thing can be said and it does not depend on purse size — shape. Three of Fortune's four names are top-order batters; the fourth is a leg-spinner who will not play the T20 edition. Among available players they hold one premium bowler, and he is unavailable. That is an odd shape, and it is not anyone's mistake — it is the procedure's output. Auctions reward priority order, and a discounted marquee name is very hard to leave on the table. Cheap stock always breaks the plan.

I am drawing a hard boundary here, because the anomaly-log reflex pulls. The report names roughly ten of 281 players. Ten names do not reveal squad depth. Writing that Fortune's bowling is thin would be the same class of claim as counting 214 no-balls across 2026-2026 ODIs and concluding Match fixing. Six hours of tape in 2026 taught me that a pattern is an argument and a clip is an anecdote — but ten names are neither. They are a half-open file.

Core: one icon each — the rule that equalises before a ball is bowled

Six teams, six icons, one apiece. This is the strongest governance signal in the story and I am surprised it is being ignored. Ask why the rule exists. Bidding capacity in a new league is never equal. If all six superstars were in open auction, two or three teams would buy them and the rest would be irrelevant to viewers on day one. Pre-assigned icons cut that structurally — the same logic as a draft giving the weakest team the first pick, applied at launch.

What is interesting is that the icon list is also balanced by role: keeper-batter, middle order, middle order/off-spin, opener, keeper-batter, Test spinner. Six profiles, roughly. That suggests allocation was not purely marketing; some cricket logic was applied. That is good news, and I will record it as good news, because my trade habitually treats bad news as evidence and good news as coincidence.

Mushfiqur Rahim's icon status says something else, and this is inference: veterans are protected from competitive bidding into brand and leadership roles. Sensible — a 38-year-old keeper-batter's auction price will undershoot his contribution and destabilise a dressing room. But the icon-selection criteria are not stated, so treat that paragraph as reconstruction, not fact.

Core: one name, two cricketers — the weakest link in the record

Now the part requiring most care. The report names "Sheikh Mehedi Hasan" sold for one crore fifty lakh to Aces Blu Stars, and separately names "Mehedi Hasan Miraz" as Walton's icon.

These are two different Bangladesh cricketers: Sheikh Mahedi Hasan, the T20 off-spin all-rounder, and Mehedi Hasan Miraz, the Test off-spinner. Transliteration conventions blur the distinction.

Which makes the report's headline — "Mehedi-Shanto at 1.5 crore" — ambiguous, and possibly a conflation of two players. Any downstream summary that merges them is unreliable.

This is not an accusation. It is the lesson of the 2026 third-umpire desk: in a replay, the first question is not what happened but who you are looking at. In Bengaluru, the decision took longer than the replay — and the least-recorded element of that whole affair was which frame the umpire was shown. Same here. The problem is not that the price is wrong; it is that the identity is unclear, and every subsequent calculation rests on that unclear identity.

Core: the December window — the real politics of this report

If you asked me to pick the single item here that will matter most, I would not pick the prices. I would pick the calendar.

The tournament begins in December. The Big Bash League runs December-January. And the report states the board granted both Rishad Hossain and Mustafizur Rahman BBL permission in the same window as its own new T20 league. Rishad, the report says plainly, cannot play the T20 edition.

Pause on that, because it is a governance decision. The NOC is a board's principal leverage; it can stop any player from going anywhere. The board used that leverage against its own league, in favour of a player it then sold at auction four days later.

The inference is that these permissions place the D3 T20 edition below established foreign leagues in release priority. The permissions are fact; the deliberate hierarchy is inference. Keeping them separate matters, because merging them would mean explaining an outcome through intent — the method I have spent a career refusing.

There is a third reading, more interesting. If the board knew Rishad would not play, why auction him? And if franchises knew, why bid sixty lakh? One answer serves both: the transaction was never about the T20 edition. So either contracts are multi-edition, or this is icon/brand payment. The report says neither. Logged, not concluded.

Core: the 281-player pool and the absent overseas name

Another absence that speaks: 281 cricketers, all "from the country". Not one overseas mention. No quota, no draft, no foreign bid.

That is a structural choice with direct consequences. The BPL model runs on foreign players — it is an international product and its rights value is built on those names. The D3 Trophy, on this evidence, is not. It is a large, corporate-sponsored domestic talent audit.

I will not reach for Hawkeye or the TMO here; that comparison would prove nothing. The useful comparison is a salary-cap draft: same problem solved, namely talent equalisation, and the same new problem created — price becomes invisible, and accountability with it.

Points instead of money, one icon per franchise, no overseas players: all three point one way. This league is built for parity and cost containment, not revenue maximisation. That is rational in Bangladesh, where new leagues most often die of franchise insolvency rather than poor cricket.

And the structure says what the text does not: all six franchises are corporate consumer brands — cement, electronics, banking, media. This is the South Asian title-sponsorship model, not the IPL owner-operator model. Valuations will be lower and dependence on title sponsorship higher. Sponsored brands do not connect a team to a city; they connect it to exposure ROI. A team named after a cement company has no neighbourhood.

Core: what was not written — the list of empty columns

The most useful habit in my log is two lists: what the record holds, and what it should have held. The second tells you more.

Absent here: fixture list, venues, home-ground mapping, overseas provision, purse cap, points-to-taka conversion, rights valuation, franchise agreement structure (ownership versus sponsorship), any stated anti-corruption monitoring, any injury history, and the definitions of the five auction categories.

The last matters most. The report says five categories existed but not what they were. Auction categories are not mere classification; they are a rationing device. They determine who can be bid on, at what floor. Without them I cannot know how much room the bidding process actually had.

This is the 2026 gap at small scale. That season I logged every leg-before appeal — release point, stride length, umpire's initials — and kept filling the file for eleven more seasons. Nobody asked for it. It still earns its keep, because when someone claims a particular umpire favoured a particular side, I can look at fifteen years of data and usually find the number disagrees.

The D3 Trophy's first season is that file, still open. By December we will know what these prices meant. Until then it is an entry.

Contrarian: the market did not err — that is the real story

The first conclusion drawn from this report was almost inevitable: the BCB subordinated its own new league to the Big Bash. It reads sharply, which is why everyone reached for it.

My objection is not to the conclusion. It is to the reasoning.

Suppose the new domestic T20 league's real objective is not a broadcast product but identifying the next national T20 squad. That objective needs two things: a large pool of domestic players in a competitive environment, and the two best players sharpened in the world's hardest T20 league and returned. The second looks contradictory and is capital investment, not expenditure.

If that reading holds, prioritising the BBL is design, not weakness — and the 60 lakh for Rishad and 70 lakh for Mustafizur are not market errors but market accuracy.

That is my contrarian angle: the shock is not that two stars went cheap. The shock is that the franchise buying them knew exactly what it was buying and bought anyway. A market knowingly buying an asset with zero first-season return is taking a position on the future. That is coherent.

But the coherence hides a risk, and it concerns teams rather than players. If sixty lakh buys a player who will not play, then there is another sixty-lakh category: the player who plays only because nobody else wanted him. Let those two prices converge and the auction stops doing its job. And in a points system, where price has no public meaning, there is no way left to detect the difference.

That is where the procedure cannot see itself. I am not saying it has happened; I am saying that if it did, we would not know. That is the difference between a good system and an opaque one.

Takeaway: three things that must be public before December

I will not close on a verdict, because I do not have the data for one. I will list three disclosures that would make this auction re-evaluable — and whose absence guarantees we spend the season reviewing a league whose scale we never learn.

One: purse size and a points-to-value conversion. Two: whether franchise contracts are single- or multi-season, which decides whether Rishad's sixty lakh is investment or exposure. Three: a declared anti-corruption monitoring arrangement, because a new league is structurally high-risk and silence is the easiest option.

The anomaly log began as a place to put what did not fit. It has a new entry today, and its heading is the simplest question the entire report leaves unanswered: what is two crore points worth?

Until that is answered, this league is a scorebook with filled pages and a blank header.