Eight teams left Moeen Ali out of the Hundred auction, and one ankle injury undid it in an afternoon

The Hundred spent five years being told it was not a proper competition, and this year it answered by holding a proper auction. Eight franchises, four of them now part-owned by IPL sides and the other four by American investors, submitted shortlists of 75 to 100 players each. Between them, that is a very wide net. Moeen Ali’s name was not in any of the eight.

On 1 August, four months later, Southern Brave signed him as an injury replacement on a Saturday afternoon and put him straight into their XI at Lord’s. I find that funny and slightly damning at the same time.

What a longlist actually measures

Moeen had done everything the process asked of him. He reversed his retirement from English domestic cricket, signed for Yorkshire for the T20 Blast, and registered for the auction at a base price of 75,000 pounds. He had private conversations with more than one franchise. Nobody put his name forward, so he never reached the ECB’s trimmed list, and once the shortlists were in the ECB was not going to reopen them. Adding players retrospectively, they said, would set a precedent they did not want. That is a defensible position and it is also how someone ends up outside a tournament that eight teams were interested enough to talk to him about.

He called the omission unfair at the time. I would go slightly further: a longlist is not a judgement on a cricketer, it is a judgement made in February by a recruitment department with a spreadsheet and a squad shape in mind. It measures whether you fit a plan drawn up before a ball is bowled. It does not measure whether you can bat at five and bowl 20 balls of off spin in the third week of a tournament when someone’s ankle has gone.

The case against him was real, though

I do not want to pretend the franchises were being stupid. Two reasons were briefed at the time and both stand up. One was his reserve price, which at 75,000 pounds is real money for a squad player rather than a match-winner. The other was his age. Moeen turned 39 in June. Teams building around a five-year IPL-backed project are not obviously wrong to spend their auction budget on players who will still be there in 2030.

There is also the small matter that he had skipped the 2025 competition entirely to play in the Caribbean. A franchise weighing up whether a 39-year-old all-rounder will prioritise their eight games over a full CPL contract is asking a fair question. It is the same question, incidentally, that Brave have now answered for themselves: he is staying in England for the rest of the Hundred and joining Antigua and Barbuda Falcons late, having been named their captain, with their first match on 8 August.

Nine off the bat at Lord’s

Then there is the awkward bit for my own argument. He made 9 before Adam Zampa got him. Brave won by five wickets anyway, and the match belonged to Jofra Archer, so nobody is going to write that Moeen changed it.

That is fine. One innings settles nothing in either direction, and I would not use nine runs to argue the auction was right any more than I would use the signing itself to argue it was wrong. What the cameo does illustrate is the actual size of the decision everyone got worked up about. This is squad cover, at roughly the size squad cover usually is.

What the Brave connection is worth

The detail I keep coming back to is which team called. Moeen captained Birmingham Phoenix for four seasons and took them to the final of the very first men’s Hundred in 2021. They lost it at Lord’s, by 32 runs, to Southern Brave. He is now in that dressing room, at 39, as cover for a player who had made one appearance. Brave are 49 per cent owned by the GMR Group, joint owners of Delhi Capitals, which is its own small comment on how quickly this competition has changed hands since that 2021 final.

Behind the joke there is a real point about what these tournaments are for. A man with 68 Tests, 138 ODIs and 92 T20Is behind him, 204 Test wickets and two white-ball World Cups, could not get eight recruitment departments to type his name into a form. Then a fielding injury in the second match of the season did it in an afternoon.

Auctions are supposed to make competitions serious. Mostly they do. But they also freeze a judgement in February and make everyone live with it until something breaks, and something always breaks. If Moeen has a decent three weeks for Brave, the honest conclusion will not be that the auction failed. It will be that eight lists of a hundred names each still had a gap in them, and it took an ankle to find it.

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