The IPL resumption
September 19th is fast approaching, which means only one thing, IPL matches are coming back to our screens. With 27 group stage games left to play, plus knockout rounds, the tournament will be wrapped up in less than a month with the final taking place on 15th October.
Due to current Covid conditions in India, the IPL will return to the UAE, the same place that the 2020 edition of IPL was hosted. With three venues being used; Abu Dhabi, Dubai and Sharjah, once again the same three grounds that were used last season. Abu Dhabi will host eight games, Sharjah will host 10, including a couple of knockout rounds and Dubai will be the most used venue, hosting 13 games, including the final.
This is how the different venues compared last season:
Sharjah was the best venue for batting last season, which isn’t really surprising as it’s comfortably the smallest. It also would’ve benefitted from having a lot less games than the other venues, meaning pitches won’t have had as much use. In general, the UAE wasn’t the happiest of destinations for spinners in terms of wicket taking but once again Sharjah was where batters had most success against spin.
Neutral fans might be hoping for a few upsets and a more competitive IPL when it resumes, with the table looking fairly lopsided at the moment:
Delhi top the table, having played a game more than their nearest competitors. Chennai were probably the best side before the tournament came to a halt, featuring in plenty of high scoring games and had won five games in a row before they lost to Mumbai in a high scoring thriller. RCB started the tournament like a house on fire, winning their first four matches, before losing a couple in their last three. Despite the strong start on paper, you never really got the sense that RCB were performing as a team, rather they were relying on unsustainable performance levels from a few individuals. Mumbai like they seemingly always do, lost their opening match but followed that up with back to back wins and some better peformances, though they perhaps haven’t been as dominant in the group stages as they’ve been in past seasons.
At the bottom half of the table, Rajasthan look best placed to make a push for the play offs, as they have at least two points or an extra game to play compared to the teams below them. However they’ve lost three first choice overseas players, so it will be tough for them. I think Punjab Kings faired how most were expecting them to, they’ve improved but not enough to make them playoff contenders. KKR were very disappointing and couldn’t quite get the balance of their side right, despite having some quality overseas options, local bowling, with the exception of Varun Chakravarthy is letting them down again. SRH were just a mess, changing captains mid season is never a great look, which is what they did when Kane Williamson took over the role from David Warner. Sunrisers look to have the role of party spoilers in the second half of the season, with their chances of making the play offs looking almost impossible.
Initial concerns over the quality of overseas players that would be joining the tournament were quickly put to bed and a lot of the star names we’ve become familiar with seeing over the years, will be back for more in September. As it stands, there have been a few big name overseas dropouts, though I should point at these are for a variety of reasons and not just covid/scheduling related. Here is a list of replacement players for the rest of IPL 2021:
Delhi Capitals - Ben Dwarshuis
Kolkata Knight Riders - Tim Southee
Pujnab Kings - Adil Rashid, Nathan Ellis & Aiden Markram.
Rajasthan Royals - Glenn Phillip, Evin Lewis & Tabraiz Shamsi
Royal Challengers Bangalore - George Garton, Tim David, Wanindu Hasaranga & Dushmantha Chameera
Sunrisers Hyderabad - Sherfane Rutherford
On the face of it, there looks to be some nice signings as well as one or two very average picks, a couple that are also clouded with recency bias but that’s standard for recruitment in any league really.
Ben Dwarshuis to replace Chris Woakes looks like an average bit of recruitment from Delhi. I’m not implying Chris Woakes is a t20 superstar, far from it, there are better options than Dwarshuis though in my view. Dwarshuis isn’t an awful bowler either but he is relatively untested outside of BBL and struggled in the blast earlier this year, going at almost 9rpo, which is undoubtedly a much weaker tournament than the IPL. I expect Ponting had a large amount of influence over this week.
KKR roping in Southee to replace Cummins is a huge downgrade, even though Cummins probably hasn’t been quite as good as KKR would’ve been hoping. I don’t expect Southee to play anyway and Lockie Ferguson should take Cummins spot in the XI, with the three other overseas players locked in the side.
Punjab Kings replacement players look to be a little underwhelming. Rashid, Ellis and Makram will be replacing a couple of big purchases at the last auction for PK - Jhye Richardson & Riley Meredith, Dawid Malan will also miss the tournament. On a personal note, I’m delighted Adil Rashid has finally got a chance for an IPL side, perhaps long overdue, though the team he has signed for is surprising. PK already have talented wrist spinner Ravi Bishnoi in their ranks, as well as the experienced Murugan Ashwin. Due to balance issues it seems difficult to build a side with Rashid and Bishnoi in the same XI, even though, in practice, it would work with having two ‘leg spinners’ in the side as they’re both different types of bowlers, I’m not sure team balance allows it. Ellis is a decent pick and recently took a hat-trick on his t20I debut for Australia. Like Chris Jordan, he is predominantly a death overs bowler so it will be interesting to see if PK consider playing both in the XI, or whether it’ll be one or the other. Aiden Markram was one of the picks I was referring to when I mentioned recency bias. There’s no doubt he is an improving t20 player but there was probably some better options available, good form has definitely worked in his favour here. It’s possible they may see a bit of potential in his part time off spin, as a side that’s notoriously had horrible balance issues they may see value in that. However, with a settled/reliable opening partnership, they’d probably have been better off targetting an ultra attacking top order player, with a high boundary percentage and strong intent against spin.
Rajasthan had perhaps the biggest job to do of any side, tasked with replacing huge gaps in their side in the absence of Buttler, Stokes and Archer. Buttler and Archer in particular are world leading players for their respective roles. Though they haven’t directly replaced all of them, good work at the last auction and strong replacement players still leaves them with an impressive group of overseas players. Morris and Livingstone will be locks as overseas players, the latter becoming one of the most in-form white ball players in the world since Rajasthan picked him up last auction at base price. Evin Lewis and Glenn Phillips will compete for the top order vacancy left by Buttler. You’d assume, based on form that Lewis will get the nod, he is having an outstanding CPL and Phillips has been underwhelming by his high standards. Depending on their balance, Mustafizur or Shamsi will occupy the final overseas spot, ‘Fizz’ is another player that’s having a fantastic 2021, although he has been playing on pitches that suit his bowling style. Shamsi may be needed as a spin option, given the form of their spinners in the first half of IPL 2021.
RCB look to be shaking off their recruitment issues from past seasons and have once again recruited well here. Garton will join the squad after t20 blast finals day, he is probably the 8th choice overseas player anyway so I’m not expecting he plays, unless they’re in a position where they have any dead rubber games. Hasaranga is a great pick and is currently one of the best spinners in white ball cricket, though there seems to be a bit of a misconception about his batting ability in t20 cricket. He isn’t a genuine ‘all-rounder’ yet. Thus RCB might feel the need to play an extra batsman, hence the possiblity of Tim David replacing Kyle Jamieson as the other overseas player. It would be a brave call dropping Jamieson, after all, he was a huge purchase at auction and it would mean they’d have to show more faith in Saini which is why I’m not convinced they’ll go down this route.
It goes without saying that Bairstow will be a huge loss for SRH, especially considering the form of Warner so far this season. A side that lacked good boundary hitters with Bairstow in the side, will be lacking them even more now. Their replacement for Bairstow is Sherfane Rutherford, another pick that looks to be heavily influenced by recent form. Having said that, Rutherford is a high upside pick and he is a very strong boundary and six hitter. While he isn’t the super strong spin hitter they probably needed, SRH have still done better with this pick than I was expecting, in the past their recruitment has been questionable at times. I think Rutherford has a strong chance of playing in a middle order that has often failed to deliver.
Overall some impressive picks, some not so impressive picks and a sprinkinling of Australian fast bowlers. Basically similar to most IPL recruitment periods. The obsession with Australian bowlers is strange, they perform slightly worse than the average overseas pace bowler and I expect if you worked this out by a price vs performance ratio, it would look even worse.
Overseas replacements covered, here is a summary of how each team has faired so far this season:
I haven’t highlighted the stats due to the differing conditions at each venue used in the first half of IPL this year. For example, CSK’s bowling looks around average but this is a harsh reflection, given they played the majority of their games so far on flatter pitches and this also makes their batting look better than it actually was. Even though their batting was still very good, it’s a slightly inflated represntation of how they performed. For the four grounds used in the first half of the season, batting economy rates varied from 7.22rpo at Chepauk to over 9 rpo at the Arun Jaitley Stadium (Delhi). So conditions were vastly different across the four venues.
I’ll cover this in more detail when I do my team by team analysis.
Below will be some graphs to highlight how different individuals have performed so far this season:
To start with we can look at a basic comparison of balls per dismissal rate vs strike rate. This isn’t the best way to assess performance, particularly given the different nature of venues played at so far this season. However, it still gives a relatively good indication of which players are doing well and others that are struggling, as well as the roles each player has within a team.
One way to get a better indication and also to allow the impact of different conditions, is to compare players to how their teammates have done:
Here we look at strike rate and boundary percentages in comparison to the average for their team. Players that impress here are exciting openers Shaw and Padikkal, as well as ABD, Russell and Bairstow. This graph also highlights the relationship between hitting boundaries and strike rate, as there are only a couple of players with negative boundary percentage difference and a positive strike rate difference.
To further improve the graph, we can look at which players face a larger percentage of balls in the tougher scoring overs. This is because scoring rates don’t tend to be as linear as they should be in t20 cricket, as shown here:
IPL 2021 has followed a similar theme to most t20 leagues so far this season, scoring rates have started cautiously (particulary 1st over, where wickets have been extremely rare) and gradually picked up towards to the end of powerplay as teams start to take more risks. This is followed by a decline in scoring rate, which doesn’t rise above the level of the last 2–3 overs in powerplay’s until around the 16 over mark and scoring rates generally tend to rise from there. Of course there are a couple of anomalies, namely the 17th, which can happen with smaller sample sizes from only half a season of IPL.
For reference here is how often wickets are taken by over in IPL 2021:
From the data we can conclude that, in general, overs 7–15 are some of the toughest from a run scoring perspective. There’s also huge value in players that look to really attack in the first three overs and do so successfully. With only half a season played so far, sample sizes are an issue for this. However, Prithvi Shaw has been extremely impressive in this regard, striking at 180 across a 72 ball sample size, Bairstow and Agarwal are also striking at 144 and 135 respectively. Those three are at the top of players to have faced at least 30 balls in overs 1–3.
If we add data for % of balls faced in overs 7–15 we get this:
This starts to show how impressive the likes of Moeen, Maxwell and Suryakumar Yadav have been, as well as Samson and of course de Villiers. Who are all in the ideal top right hand corner of this graph, despite facing more than 50% of their deliveries between overs 7–15.
Now we can look at which players are fastest scoring against pace & spin:
Prithvi Shaw really stands out here and if he continues the level of form he showed in the first half of IPL, he ought to be a regular around India’s t20 squad. Suryakumar Yadav and Faf also look strong here, AB de Villiers is slightly below average against spin but absurdly good against pace. While Glenn Maxwell has been virtually the opposite, below average against pace but very strong against spin. IPL follows the general theme of t20 cricket, in the sense that pace bowlers are more expensive than spinners. This is because spinners tend to bowl a larger percentage of deliveries between overs 7–15, which as shown above are generally lower scoring.
Time to look at bowlers. We’ll start with a general overview of just economy rate vs strike rate:
Unsurprisingly a lot of pace bowlers appear in the bottom right hand corner; regular wicket takers but more expensive than average. Which is due to the overs they usually operate in. Spinners mostly on the left hand side of the graph, led by Rashid Khan, who is once again having an outstanding tournament.
If we look at economy rates compared to teammates, it once again favours spinners:
Any pace bowler that appears on the left hand side of the graph, is likely having a strong tournament, particularly those with above average strike rates. Going further, if we once again add in the filter to show % of balls bowled between overs 7–15:
We can see from this that some of the standout pace bowlers so far this tournament would include Avesh Khan, Bumrah, Morris and Siraj. Particularly Avesh Khan, who enjoyed a breakthrough season and was a wicket taking threat in all phases. A couple of bowlers that have really struggled are Shardul Thakur and Yuzi Chahal, which is perhaps why they haven’t been included in India’s t20 squad for the World Cup. Though their form has been questionable in t20’s for a while.
Finally, let’s look at death overs bowling and who has impressed:
Bumrah. End of discussion, he is the best around by a distance. He hasn’t got the wicket haul he deserves yet but in terms of economy rate and preventing boundaries he is so for ahead of the rest. Morris and Harshal Patel have been the best wicket takers in overs 16–20, Rabada has struggled in comparison to his numbers in previous seasons.
That concludes the first part of my writing on the IPL resumption, team analysis will follow shortly.
Thanks for reading!
Stats: cricmetric
