IPL set for grand finale

So 56 games after this ‘hurricane’ through the game began one of 4 teams stands on the edge of becoming the inaugural winners of the Indian Premier League, if they can get to Sunday and win in the final.

So who’s there? Making an absolute mockery of the notion that you get what you pay for, or perhaps proving that having money doesn’t necessarily mean you know what to do with it, the 3 highest spending clubs did not make it to the semi-finals!

• Mumbai Indians – Squad Cost: $111.90million;
• Bangalore Royal Challengers – Squad Cost: $111.60million;
• Deccan Chargers – Squad Cost: $107.01million.

Well done to those franchises who obviously got dazzled by star players instead of those who could do a job for them!

True congratulations should go to Shane Warne’s Rajasthan Royals, who finished top of the table with the lowest squad cost in the tournament ($67million). Is Warne the finest captain Australia never had? On this evidence yes. He has shown that no matter how much money you squirt around, it is no substitute for the nous that he has. If he were a footballer he would be a top level manager. What little he did spend on foreign imports they played a key part for him. Graeme Smith and Shane Watson, Sohil Tanvir and Watson again with the ball can all hold their heads high. He also brought through young local players such as Asnodkar and Trivedi, showing much promise with bat and ball respectively.

In second, Kings XI Punjab powered by the awesome batting performances of the imported Aussie Shaun Marsh, who tops the runscoring table with 593 runs from 10 innings at an average of just under 75. Just to underline his performances, he is 70 runs ahead of his nearest rival who took an extra 3 innings to get into that 2nd place. It wasn’t all his work mind with international class acts like Sangakkara, Jayawardene and the captain Yuvraj all weighing in with runs. Their bowling line-up is at least as good as their batters with Sreesanth, Chawla and Ifran Patan all currently in the top 10 wicket takers list of the tournament. A solid all-round team.

Chennai Super Kings snared third spot with the captain Dhoni being one of the few high cost players to be near worth his asking price. He has inspired his team into the semi-finals and he should get kudos for this. Matty Hayden got them off to a flyer before he left for the Caribbean, as I predicted he would, but in terms of batting their’s has been a team effort rather than outstanding individuals. Similarly with the bowlers, though I’m sure Murali will be disappointed to only have 8 wickets from his 13 games. Their best player has arguably been the South African Morkel whose hard hitting has got him 225 runs at a strike rate of 150 and 13 wickets.

The last team in the semi-finals are the Delhi Daredevils by a single point from the 5th placed team, the Mumbai Indians. Getting them off to blazing starts in the tournament are the opening pair that took India to the first ever international Twenty20 trophy last year in South Africa. Gambhir and Sehwag have pedigree and the fact they have batted together at international level is obvious, Gambhir playing the ‘anchor role’ (strike rate: 144) to Sehwag’s more swashbuckling stance (strike rate: 187). No team is just made of batsmen however, as I’m sure the Master of Miserly, Glenn McGrath, influencing the attack might have something to do with why they’ve got to the semi-finals.

Looking over all the teams, I feel Kings XI Punjab team have got the best balance and come into the finals off the back of a big win against the Royals, who did admittedly rest players knowing they were already in the finals. Chennai and Delhi have teams that are batsman led with few match winning bowlers. It is because they have effective bowlers as well as batsmen that I back Kings XI Punjab to win on Sunday.

Does the IPL erode classical batting?

The past few weeks have seen cricket purists mourn what they see to be the core skills of the game, being eroded by the need, as they see it, for big slogging with further degradation of classic cricket shots such as the cover drive. Is there any truth in these claims?

In theory, the 20 over game suits those batsmen that can score quickly and is assumed by cricketing purists to be burly batsmen who like to crash their runs through boundaries with strength, rather than timing. So lets look at the leading runs scorers in the high profile Indian Premier League tournament as of the end of play today (1st May 2008).

Name	Total runs	Fours	Sixes	Runs in boundaries	% of runs in boundaries	% of runs in the ‘v’
M Hayden	189	24	6	132	70%	43%
B McCullum	188	13	15	142	76%	n/a
R Sharma	178	19	7	118	66%	40%
K Sangakkara	175	22	4	112	64%	39%
G Gambhir	174	23	2	104	60%	18%

(Stats from Cricinfo.com)

The renown big hitters Hayden and McCullum, are numbers 1 and 2 in the leading runs list gives some weight to the purist argument of batsmen muscling their runs by smashing the ball to or over the boundary rope. However, the stroke makers Sangakkara and Gambhir at numbers 4 and 5 give credibility to the counter argument of non-power players being able to prosper in this form of the game. The relative high amount of 4s among the boundary count of these two players would seem to indicate a preference for shots along the ground, whereas McCullum has more than half his boundaries clearing the ropes giving an indication of his powerful hitting, even though the boundaries of the IPL grounds have apparently been made smaller for the tournament.

Often the mark of an assertive classical batsman is one that plays with a straight bat and hence often accumulates his runs in front of square in the ‘v’ roughly from around mid-on to mid-off, hence the final column of the above table is a very crude indicator of a batsman gaining runs in a ‘classical’ fashion. McCullum’s figures have not been included as the vast majority of his runs were gathered in his explosive innings on debut, in the inaugural IPL match, but a visual indication of his run scoring areas is given here. Perhaps it is too early to spot any patterns with all the batsmen barring Gambhir scoring a good proportion of their runs in the ‘v’ going against the purist notion that the IPL encourages cross bat slogging. A closer look at Gambhir’s scoring areas reveals that he is more of touch player preferring to use the pace of the cricket ball to nudge runs square on both sides of the wicket.

So is the IPL diluting classical cricket skills on the part of the batsman? At the moment it’s hard to say, the early signs are that there are unsurprisingly more boundaries being hit in a batsman’s time at the crease, but there also seems to be little sign of the degradation of proper cricket shots in preference of cross bat slogging. As is the case with most arguments, the answer would appear to lie somewhere between the extreme points of view.