Vipers Analyst Freddie Wilde on the auction - plus the fixtures for Season 5 are here!

Freddie Wilde, thank you very much indeed for joining us here on Vipers Voices.

A pleasure to see you.

Pleasure to hear from you.

Let's talk about the auction, and, uh, I wonder how much preparation went into it from your perspective.

How many hours of footage would you have studied, uh, and gone through? What does that preparation involve?

Yeah, plenty of preparation, um, is the simple answer.

Really, it sort of starts probably a few months out from the auction when we start talking about there's obviously this season we had the opportunity for direct signings and retentions, and there's a wild card as well.

So four players could be sort of signed pre-auction with the addition of a wild card, and that conversation was something that started, yeah, I can't really remember now, but I, I imagine the, the WhatsApp group with myself, Moods, Phil, and Fozzie would have probably kicked into gear at some point, um, in around June, I'm guessing.

Um, and we probably had back and forth on there for a few weeks.

Then as you get nearer to the auction itself, so when was the auction? It was in sort of early October.

For most of September, that prep sort of ramped up.

A lot of it involves scoping out what we call depth charts.

So you obviously have different slots in your side or holes that you need to fill, and part of the job is actually just identifying a list of players who we think are gonna enter the auction for each role.

And you might find that some roles are better populated or have better depth than others, and therefore you might need to spend more money in that area or prioritize that area.

So that's something that kicks up into gear through September.

But really until you get the auction order, the, the actual set order of when players are going to, to, to appear, you can't get into the nitty-gritty of auction dynamics and planning to sort of the, the, the level of detail that you require on the day.

And I think we received the auction order on maybe the Monday, and the auction was on the Thursday.

So you then have quite a rushed period in which you're sort of working through that and building out a more detailed plan.

I mean, I f- I flew from London to Dubai on the Tuesday, I think, with Phil, and when we received the set order maybe the day before.

But we w- we sat down on the plane and went through it, and then we had a meeting with Moods and then Jack and Sam, who help out with our development program on the Wednesday, a long, a long meeting that day where we sort of, um, hashed out those details that I just talked about.