“Lot 32: how much am I bid for a 1971 model Adam Gilchrist, heavily used but still in good running order? Worth a couple of Kartiks or half a Tendulkar.”

It seems mercenary, but such bartering will take place over the bodies of some of cricket’s most fêted names in nine days’ time when the owners of the eight franchises in the Indian Premier League (IPL), the official one of two Twenty20 tournaments in India, sit down in Bombay for an auction of players for the league’s inaugural season, which will start on April 18.

Gilchrist, who is soon to retire from international cricket, is one of the biggest draws, with Shahrukh Khan, a Bollywood actor and owner of the Calcutta franchise, leading the hunt to claim the Australia wicketkeeper. The franchises can spend between $3 million (about £1.5 million) and $5 million on building their squads for the 44-day tournament, with eight foreign internationals allowed each, although only four can play in any one game.

The franchise owners bid up to $100 million each for their teams and Sony reportedly paid $1 billion for the broadcast rights for ten years. The players will earn a minimum of $200,000. Little wonder, with all this money slushing around, that the chief executives of the 18 English counties (and no doubt domestic teams around the world) fear the effect that the IPL will have on their own teams. Many have resigned themselves to losing their overseas players for the first two months of the season, while others say that it will become much harder to attract foreign players to England.

Shane Warne is county cricket’s biggest loss to the IPL. He will have talks this week with Rod Bransgrove, the Hampshire chairman, about his availability this season for the county that he captains. However, Justin Langer, the Somerset captain, who has also signed a memorandum of understanding with the IPL, is expected to be playing at Taunton against a Warne-less Hampshire on April 20.

“Justin has signed a three-year agreement with IPL – they rushed around to stick everyone on retainers – but this year he is with us,” Richard Gould, the Somerset chief executive, said. “The IPL will make signing the best overseas players more difficult but it has been getting that way with the international workload.”

Among the other counties who may lose players to the IPL for the start of the season are Derbyshire (Mahela Jayawardena), Middlesex (Murali Kartik), Surrey (Mohammad Asif), Kent (Justin Kemp) and Glamorgan (Jason Gillespie). Matthew Maynard, the Glamorgan cricket manager, will not be signing cover for Gillespie, but is disappointed that the IPL, which was originally due to start next month, had been pushed back to the middle of April. “We knew we wouldn’t get him until May 10, but now it will be early June,” Maynard said. “We’re still happy to have him. But the IPL could have a massive impact on the game. In a few years there could be fixtures between Manchester and Mumbai.”

Mark Newton, the chief executive of Worcestershire, said that the IPL was “making life very difficult, there are very few high-class overseas players available”. He suggested that English players could also be courted. “I can see a scenario when a county player is coming to the end of his career and is offered $200,000 for six weeks’ work,” he said. “Throw in media work and it would be tempting.”

There is an added complication with a second staging of the Indian Cricket League (ICL), a rebel venture which attracted more than a dozen county-contracted players, including Paul Nixon, Chris Read, Darren Maddy and Vikram Solanki, when first held in December. The organisers of ICL are planning to hold a tournament from March 6 to April 6.

The four English participants are not expected to take part, but Northamptonshire will lose their South African Kolpak players – Andrew Hall, Johan van der Wath and Nicky Boje, the new captain – from preseason training. Stuart Law, who captained the Chennai Superstars to the first ICL title, will stay with Lancashire. “He is focused on his work with us,” a county spokeswoman said.

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