The IPL is now heading into its fourth season and as we know the whole of India turns an even darker shade of loopy during the 74-match tournament. Two new teams are being introduced in 2011 from Pune and Kochi (yes, those are the names of the cities and not the curry that’s currently repeating on me).

Now come January 8 there will be 416 cricketers that are auctioned amongst the ten teams. West Indies legend Brian Lara, who hasn’t played meaningful cricket for four years, is among the group of new names along with current England stars Graeme Swann, Stuart Broad and James Anderson.

And so to the numeric stuff. Each franchise will receive $9m to spend on their recruitments and there are three upper salary categories for the top players. Biff and AB fall under the top bracket and are set to earn (drum roll) $400 000 [R2.7m] for competing. Maybe Biffy wouldn’t mind buying Clyro Hairo a new R8 with that wad of cash. Mind you Jacques is also not doing too badly in the second tier, pulling in a not-too-shabby $300k.

It’s certainly a good time to be involved in 20-20 cricket. It seems that only the purists with a penchant for tests are the ones watching the five-day game nowadays. However, swashbuckling 20-20 is here to stay and so it seems the format can only benefit those players that have given the IPL a shot (and with salaries like these, can you blame them?)

The players with the reserve price of $400,000 are:

Daniel Vettori, Brendon McCullum, Ross Taylor, Adam Gilchrist, Brett Lee, Shaun Marsh, James Anderson, Kevin Pietersen, Stuart Broad, Graeme Swann, Luke Wright, Michael Yardy, Rahul Dravid, Anil Kumble, Yuvraj Singh, Graeme Smith, AB de Villiers, Mahela Jayawardene, Tillakaratne Dilshan, Brian Lara, Chris Gayle

Second Tier ($300k):

Jacques Kallis, Muttiah Muralitharan, Zaheer Khan, Yusuf Pathan, Shaun Tait, Andrew Symonds, Angelo Mathews, Kumar Sangakkara

Third Tier ($200k):

Sourav Ganguly, Gautam Gambhir, Michael Hussey, Doug Bollinger, Dirk Nannes, Eoin Morgan, Robin Uthappa, Sanath Jayasuriya, David Hussey

[Source: Sport24]

Image via ecb.co.uk