IPL MVPs part one - the powerplay

Looking at old series with new eyes

When the IPL started, we knew pretty much nothing about T20 cricket. The early England teams did their best, but there was no real reason for players to be specialists. When the first IPL rolled around, we saw RCB pick a Test team, as the thought was, then the best cricketers were better than T20 bashers. That is now clearly not the case. 

If you are Kevon Cooper or Ben Cutting, you could get paid heaps more than Vernon Philander or Dimuth Karunaratne.

But those early seasons still exist, and often the way we looked at them back then was with little knowledge of T20 cricket. And so what we wanted to do is look back at the best players in each edition of the IPL. But with the knowledge of today. This means we will reexamine some of the well-known seasons, but also shine a light on some that weren’t given much respect.

This is the first episode of our MVP series. We are not just looking at the best player from each year, but at players who had MVP-quality seasons. If you like the idea, hit us up in the comments, press the bell icon and subscribe, Because this is just the beginning, we have gone through every completed season.

In order to do that, the majority of the metrics we are using are contextual. Because when you do something in T20, it makes a huge difference. 

We are starting with the true average. If you come to the wicket for the first ball of the innings, you are expected to average 33 in the IPL for the last 12 months. But if you enter the match with a score of 25/4, you’re not. So we factor these things in to come up with a True Average. If you look at the top ten players all time on average, you find a lot of openers, but if you look at it on true average you get a lot of players from numbers 1-7. Which is the spread we want.  

None of this means anything without the strike rate, of course. But looking at the strike rates of players is hugely deceiving. Someone who bats middle overs can strike at 135, and be well above the normal rate, while someone at the death might strike at 145 and be behind it. Every ball has a different strike rate in T20, the first ball is 60, and the last ball is 173. So if you score a single off one ball, you are plus 0.4 runs, and the other one is down 0.7. So we have looked at everyone’s strike rate by the ball they faced to come up with a true strike rate. 

There are also bowlers in T20, so it’s worth looking at them too. True Economy is basically exactly the same as true strike rate but for bowlers. 

And True Wickets is looking at how many wickets a bowler got, and what a normal bowler in the same overs would get. Again, a lot of wickets happen at the end. So death bowlers tend to dominate the leaderboards. But the bowlers who take wickets early and in the middle at higher rates are usually the most valuable. And so we have a metric that shows how many wickets above or below expectation each player has. less

We’re also looking at raw counting stats, and each player has been involved with at least 250 balls in a tournament in order to look at them in this way. The idea is to look at players who may have been overlooked for various cap winners or players of the tournament winners. 

But also just to point out when players had the most valuable player calibre seasons to see which are the most dominant players in the league so far. 

2008

We clearly see two outliers on this list: Virender Sehwag and Shaun Marsh. Both were opening batters, but they added value in completely different ways. Sehwag was way ahead of his time. He was much, much quicker than his peers in this format. He was perhaps the equivalent of a Viv Richards in T20 back then but without the hype. Marsh was an elite wicket preserver who scored at a pretty good clip himself. Even in today’s date, a player like him would be in demand. He was Faf before Faf happened. Even though they are basically the same age. 

Jayasuriya and Yusuf Pathan had incredible seasons too. The Sri Lankan opener played the way he did throughout his illustrious international career - slap hard from ball one. Pathan was one of the few prototype T20 cricketers India has ever produced, even now Yusuf stands out as an Indian player. 

Sohail Tanvir was clearly the standout bowler in the inaugural edition of the campaign. Not only in terms of true wickets, but he was also numero uno in true economy. He was the entire enchilada. You will find a bunch of good fast bowlers - Steyn, Pollock, Nehra, Munaf and Dinda - with their true economies in the -1 to -0.3 range and at par in terms of true wickets. 

Two of the greatest bowlers in history - McGrath and Murali - had very similar seasons. They were extremely economical, showing that Test-quality bowling had value even in the shortest format. Irfan and Maharoof were also instrumental in their respective roles - powerplay bowling and middle overs enforcer.

But let's talk about Shane Watson, the actual MVP. He scored 472 runs at over 9 runs per over & took 17 wickets at an economy of 7.7, making it arguably one of the greatest all-round performances in an IPL season. To top it off, he also played a crucial part in the playoffs with both bat and ball and won the title with Rajasthan Royals.

These are incredible numbers. Watson was essentially a frontline batter AND a frontline bowler for the Royals that season. This almost never happens, see Narine’s batting and Russell’s bowling. We talk all-rounders all the time. But at best most players can do well in one and hold their own in the other. This is something else. The following numbers testify to the fact that his workload was incredible that year.

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