Thursday, April 30, 2009How the teams will perform this year?Part 1 We are a third of the way through this edition of the Indian Premier League. Most teams have played five matches, and that gives us a fair indicator of how they will perform going forward. Unlike just one match, such as Bangalore’s emphatic 75 run victory over Rajasthan on the opening day of the competition, or Kolkata’s 140 run triumph to open last season; five matches give us a sense of a team’s consistency and depth. A look at last year’s ratings after five matches shows that the top four had already started to pull away from the rest of the pack. For the IPL 2008
There was some shuffling in the standings as the tournament progressed- Chennai lost Matthew Hayden and Michael Hussey, and started to slip down. Mumbai got Sachin Tendulkar back and moved up, while Rajasthan built on their momentum with Shane Watson and Sohail Tanvir coming into their own. Overall, the trimester rankings gave us a reasonable idea of which teams would make the knockout stage. So we decided to evaluate each team’s performance through the first trimester of the IPL 2009 (with a grade from A-F). You can check out the full list of team rankings by clicking here. Rajasthan Royals Current Castrol Index Rank: 5 Batting Grade: D Bowling Grade: B Final Grade: C What’s Hot: Super(over)man Yusuf Pathan. What’s Not: The rest of the batting- Rajasthan are the 7th best batting side overall and dead last in terms of Quick Start Bat i.e. batting performance in the first 6 overs. Quick Fix: The batting needs to fire if Rajasthan want to make it to the semis. Bring back Tyron Henderson and hope that he shows the big hitting from his stint with Middlesex. Graeme Smith and Swapnil Asnodkar also need to step up. Likely Final Position: Will fight for a semi-final spot but just miss out. Mumbai Indians Current Castrol Index Rank: 1 Batting Grade: A+ Bowling Grade: A Final Grade: A What’s Hot: The openers and the bowlers. Mumbai have the most complete bowling line-up with Lasith Malinga in great form. They may not be there now, but this side might well finish atop the league standings. What’s Not: Zaheer Khan has not been up to scratch, which means Mumbai don’t have a great Quick Start Bowl. The other concern is the lack of a keeper-batsmen. Quick Fix: Mumbai should comfortably make the semis based on current performance and Zaheer is bound to improve. But they will lose Dwayne Bravo for the latter stages of the competition. Kyle Mills should be Bravo’s replacement- Mumbai need to get him going in the league stages. Likely Final Position: Top three finish. Kolkata Knight Riders Current Castrol Index Rank: 8 Batting Grade: D Bowling Grade: F Final Grade: F What’s Hot: Sourav Ganguly making a point with his batting. What’s Not: KKR rank dead last in overall batting momentum, second last in overall bowling efficiency and seemingly last in team chemistry! And now they are without Gayle. Quick Fix: Seems like too much has gone wrong to fix this time, and KKR will battle with Bangalore for 7th spot. Brendon McCullum needs to start scoring, coming down the order with Ganguly and Hodge opening could help. Likely Final Position: 7th at best. Part 2 of this article will evaluate the performances of the remaining franchises.
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Saturday, April 25, 2009Who should have bowled the Super Over for KKR?Who should have bowled the Super Over for Kolkata KnightRiders in their last match against Rajasthan Royals? Castrol Index tries to find out whether it was wise to send Ajantha Mendis into the crunch situation or whether there were other bowlers that could have been considered by the KKR think tank. Let us consider first that each team consisting of three batsmen and one bowler playing one Super Over is like playing a whole game of T20 in just one over. So the mindset of all the batsmen metamorphoses into hitting all the 6 balls to the farthest corners of the ground. It is indeed a crunch situation and the player who can keep his cool and hit or bowl the ball in the right places will win. Given all of the above, other than Mendis, the names which could have cropped up in the team’s think-tank were Ishant Sharma, Chris Gayle or even Sourav Ganguly himself. The table below shows the bowlers with the current Index, their economy rate in the first column and their percentage of balls that have been hit for boundaries. (As an illustration, the table below indicates that 14% of Mendis’ balls bowled in IPL 2009 were hit for a four or a six)
Ajantha Mendis scores better in his Bowling Efficiency because he picks up more wickets. He is also economical and he has a different action which can fox the opponent. It would therefore seem that KKR team management did the right job in sending him going by Castrol Index. However, in the Super Over, isn’t it better to use a bowler who concedes lesser percentage of boundaries than takes more wickets? Sourav and Chris Gayle score higher than the regular bowlers in this category, as shown by Castrol Index. Morevover, the fact that Mendis was playing his first match in the tournament may have hightened the pressure of performance on him- especially when facing a batsman of Yusuf Pathan’s calibre. It must be noted here that Yusuf doesn’t yield too many dot balls to the bowlers (62% scoring shots) and hits 31% of the balls to boundaries (table shows Yusuf’s credentials with the bat).
The Extreme Pressure situation might have got to Mendis, even as he haplessly looked on when Yusuf’s catch was dropped in the second ball of the Super Over. (0) Comments
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