The Arshdeep Singh question

Arshdeep Singh’s career so far, with special mentions for Sam Curran and Umran Malik.

One of the most common things I am asked these days is simply, is Arshdeep Singh really that good? And luckily for me, he was someone I obsessed over from almost day one. There was just something about him that seemed like it would break. Yet here we are, he’s an Indian player, doing well in the IPL again, and this has been going on for a while.

So let’s start with the basics. Part of the reason he is successful is that India produce so few top-class left-arm white ball T20 bowlers. The Zaheer Khan, Ashish Nehra and RP Singh generation is long gone, and so he has been promoted massively in the last few years. You can see compared to other teams they just don’t have the juice, so for him.

But it would be massively underselling him to suggest he is only good because of his arm. It is hard to build a career as a player with only one plus skill. And while he isn’t a zero in the field, he is certainly not a massive plus, and he cannot bat. Last season he made a ten not out, which is almost half his career tally.

So just to survive so far he has to be doing something right. The bowling is not so obviously clear-cut. Arshdeep’s record by year is so interesting. There has not been a year he has combined a sub-30 average with sub-eight econ. And so it would be easy at that point to think he’s been lucky so far.

But his overall record is an average of 25 and an econ of 8.35. He takes wickets while going for runs pretty consistently. That suggests a trend more than luck. However, these are his raw numbers, and they make him look like a bowler who takes wickets and gets hit.

Coming into this year he’s the opposite. His true wickets - when you factor in what overs he has bowled, - actually suggest he takes very so slightly fewer wickets on average than the average bowler would. I have chucked in Umran Malik here, to show just how many extra wickets he has in his career when factoring in for when he bowls. Now part of this is because Malik bowls in the middle when wickets are not expected, but also because he takes them there when most don’t. But Arshdeep still is below average here.