Retention rules keep dismantling the one thing that takes years to build

A defensive unit is a trained relationship between four players, and the auction calendar treats it as four separate assets.

You can buy a raider and use him the following week. He needs to know the plan, he needs to be fit, and the rest is his own body doing what it has always done. A defensive unit does not work like that.

A chain tackle is four people making the same decision within a fraction of a second, based on habits built over hundreds of repetitions against each other in training. Who steps first. Who covers the far side. Who commits to the ankle and who takes the torso. None of that is written down in a way a new signing can read on the flight in. It is learned, and it takes most of a season to learn properly.

Which makes the retention rules in franchise kabaddi genuinely destructive, because they are built around individuals. A team can keep a certain number of players and the rest go back into the pool. So a side that has spent two seasons growing a corner and cover pairing that understands each other gets to protect maybe one of them, and the relationship, which was the actual asset, evaporates. The player is retained. The unit is not.

Raiders do not suffer this. A raider's value travels with him, which is one more reason franchises overpay for attack. They are buying something portable.

I would like to see a retention slot that applies to a pair rather than a person. Let a franchise protect two defenders together at a combined price, as a single unit, and see what happens to the quality of defending across the league within three seasons. It would be administratively awkward. Auctions like clean lots.

The objection is competitive balance. Retention rules exist to stop strong franchises hoarding, and letting a side lock down a settled defence for years is exactly the hoarding the system was written to prevent. That is a real tension and I am not pretending otherwise.

But look at the standard of chain defending in the opening fortnight of any season, when half the units are meeting for the first time. It is bad, everyone says so on air, and then it is forgotten by the playoffs. We rebuild that mess deliberately, every year, on purpose.