IPL 2009 - Glory to the oldies ...

As i posted earlier (closer to the midway mark), i made a quick framework to measure batting & bowling success in the IPL. 

• For batting, i considered: Runs, Average, Strike rate 
• For bowling, i considered: Wickets, Average, Run per over, Strike rate

I worked around the formulas and finally came across a measure that i felt gave equal weightage to batting & bowling and applied it across IPL 2008 & 2009. I didn't take fielding stats into consideration. Also, i didn't give weightages to 50s, 100s, 4Ws, 5Ws. I shall try and work something out later.

But as it stands today, IPL 2009's best batsmen & bowlers don't play any cricket outside IPL & probably backyard cricket - M Hayden & Anil Kumble. The contrast with which they reached the pinnacle is huge: Hayden, post match 4/5 dominated batting in IPL 2009. Kumble had a great first match and then lagged in the ratings (never dropping out of Top 10 though) and his final performance enabled him to pip RP Singh (who was Top 2 from the time i started tracking)

Some notes:

• To me, 40 is the score of a good performer. There were 24 in 2008 & 21 in 2009 with scores above 40. There are six players who scored 40+ in both IPLs: Rohit Sharma, Gilly, Irfan Pathan (that surprised me!), Symonds, Raina, Amit Mishra (another supriser). MS Dhoni just missed it for this year (38.8 compared to 59.4 last year) and Hayden played too few matches (4, i think) last year to get to 40 (he finished with 36 still!)
• Last year's top 10 included 5 batsmen, 2 all-rounders (Watson & Yusuf) and 3 bowlers. This year, the tide shifted to the bowlers - 7 bowlers, 1 all-rounder (Rohit Sharma) and 2 batsmen (Hayden & de Villiers)

2009 Top performers:

2008 Top performers:

IPL - Best Players in 2009 are ...

Raina, Hayden & Malinga ... the best-player, batsman & bowler of IPL 2008 till date.

I created a Value Index for batting & bowling. Batting VI = Product of (No. of runs, Strike Rate, Average)/20000 & Bowling VI = Product of (Wickets, (40-Average), (12-RPO), (30-SR)). Get in touch with me if you want to debate the formula. LVI indicates the VI for the previous year.

The following is the list of best performing bowlers & batsmen in IPL 2009:

Criteria: Min. of 100 runs. Missing this mark are Sehwag, Gambhir, Pieterson, Flintoff & McCullam.

Malinga has amazing stat line - 11 wickets at average shade below 10, RPO of 4.83 and SR of less than 12. Thus, he takes a wicket once every 2 overs giving less than 10 runs in those overs. Brilliant. If he continues his performance, he will most likely even overshadow the spectacular performance from Sohail Tanveer last year.

Spinners have done well too - Jakati, Ojha, Kumble, Hodge & Raina have done well. Overall, bowler's performance this year is likely to upstage last year. Isn't that expected - South African pitches aren't the featherbeds of the subcontinent.

To compare, find the tables for last year's performance - Shane Watson, Stuart Marsh and Sohail Tanveer were the best player, batsman & bowler from last year's edition.

PS: I edited the formula and hence re-wrote the entire article.

PS II: I changed the formula for batting - increased denominator from 20k to 30k. That bought the batting scores of last year to about par on bowling. Thus, last year's best performer was Sohail Tanveer & not Stuart Marsh, and that's the way it should be.

There is no point in re-doing all the graphs. I shall do another blog once the tournament is over. Will show the revised charts then.