India’s T20 cricket league, IPL’s 2021 edition recently concluded with Chennai Super Kings winning their 4th title. The season was certainly a unique one, having been conducted in two legs due to covid. Further we also saw a bunch of new players coming through like Gaikwad, Venkatesh, CV Varun etc. In this post, I am hoping to take a look back at the event, from a statistical point of view.

Batsman’s Game

Cricket has often been accused of being biased towards the batsman and there’s certainly some truth to it. Further most teams this season have been reliant on their batting line up or have struggled due it performing below expectations. Let’s first consider the performances of batsmen in the first half of the tournament played in India.

In the below graphs we can clearly see how reliant Punjab were on their skipper KL Rahul, as he is the only player whose name pops up in all three list. While showcasing his ability as a batsman, the lack of any other player from his team shows the trouble his team faced throughout the season.

Further it’s noticeable that the players from CSK and DC pop up more often than others, explaining their success in this season and also partially due to them having their games in venues which had higher scores in average.

In the UAE Leg, KKR seemed to be a completely different team compared to the first leg and credit for that certainly goes to their top order batsmen Venkatesh, Shubham Gill and Rahul Tripathi, all of whom are among the top 10 run getters in the second half. Further Gaikwad certainly was the most consistent player through the UAE leg accumulating the most runs and helping his team win the title in the processes. (Note that Playoff matches have been ignored)

Bowler’s Delight

Besides the Batsmen who often take the limelight, bowlers played a crucial role in determining the performance of their teams. We saw some young Indian bowlers like Harshal Patel and Avesh Khan perform beyond expectations, while the more established bowlers showcased their class once again.

Considering the top 10 wicket takers from the first leg of the tournament, we can already see the youngsters shining with most wickets and at an exception average and strikerate. On the other hand, more established like Rashid Khan, Jadeja and Bumrah top the chart in terms of economy as batsmen tend to be more prepared against them. Interestingly Shardul Thakur struggled to find form, having amongst the worst economy in the first half (min. 100 balls).

The second half of the season however belonged to the more established bowlers like Bumrah, Shami and Chahal, who made up three of the top six wicket takers. Contributing to the rise of KKR in the later stages of the tournament three of the top five most economical bowlers were Varun, Ferguson and Narine. Noticeably CV Varun had an economy of mere 5.33, which clearly restricted the opponents.

Team Performance

This season saw the rise of CSK after an underwhelming season in 2020. Interestingly, the team did not change many player, with the only noticeable addition being that of Moen Ali to strengthen the middle order, which he certainly did. With both the openers often giving the side a good base to build their innings on, it’s not difficult to see why CSK has an extraordinary runrate while batting in the death overs, with the likes of Rayudu and Jadeja shining whenever called upon.

On the otherhand SRH’s struggle in the middle order is certainly worth mentioning here, as they struggled to keep the runs flowing after the powerplay. A similar trend can be seen in MI’s case, whose middle order often struggled to get going. While RCB and DC show a similar trend, with their runrate taking a dip after the powerplay, however as the next graph shows, they do manage to not lose wickets which helps them score better in the death overs.

Unsurprisingly the MI’s struggle in middle order through the season becomes blantantly visible in the below graph as they lead the teams in terms of average wickets lost in the middle order. With majority of their batsmen being out of form for the tournament, they in average lose 2.8 wickets in the middle orders, hindering their chances to maximize the score in the death overs.

Conclusion

It’s not hard to see why CSK and DC had a smooth ride through the season and a few others struggled to get going. While this was just a descriptive and brief analysis of the data, we can still see some trend emerge amongst the successful teams, such as retaining wickets in the middle overs and capitalizing the powerplay and death overs. Further we can see trends emerge amongst teams, such as KKR who started to go up the table once their top order started to fire, however discussing the details of these is beyond the scope of this post.

Notes

• The data has been collected from kaggle and are approximated.
• Plotly has been used to generate the plots used in this blogpost.
• Play off matches have been ignored to have a fair comparison amongst teams, with equal matches played.