T20 - Team Game or Individual Brilliance

I write this during the 37^th Match between RCB and MI, a match in which the Gayle brilliance did not make its appearance. Still Gayle has been the talking point with his sixes & the dance that he has been doing on field. When you think about these examples T20 is all about individuals. Antics on the field cant be a team thing. Sammy pulling out a soother on making his first 50 of the IPL is about the individual. The west Indians have been adding a lot of colour, which is also individual. Virat’s behaviour on the field is also about an individual. Virat and Gambhir having a public spat is also about individuals (they are in opposite teams). Flying catches by Ponting or brilliant run-outs by Kohli is again about individuals. Siddhu’s shayari and Ravi’s boring routine is all about individuals.

So, what’s the point of writing this? T20 is about Individual brilliance. Out and over. What happens if a team has 3 run-outs in one innings (MI in 37^th match)? Or what happens, if a captain abuses a team member on camera (GG to Balaji)? Team work or lack of it?

But this is all qualitative. We need to get quantitative and look at some data.

First the discussion at a match level.

Looked at the top 4 bowling performances in IPL 2013, which had 4 or more wickets in an innings. In one of them the match was lost and 2 were supported by some great batting performances. Only one of them, that of Amit Mishra against Pune Warriors won the match single handedly. So, only 25% of top bowling performances won the match singly.

Next up, looked at top 10 batting performances with 85 runs and more in an innings. Out of 10, 4 of them involved another batsmen. 2 of the wins came with the support of a bowler and 1 of them was in a losing cause. Only 3 of them were singly responsible for winning the match and 2 of them came from Gayle. Again 30% of top batting performances got to wins singly.

I have limited data, but only 25-30% of top performances lead to single-handedly winning the match. If that is the case with top performances then it will be definitely lower with cameos.

If this analysis is about an individual match, a tournament like IPL is over a period of time and therefore for an individual the law of averages also catches up.  So, lets look at tournament performance.

I took all the batsmen who have scored 200+ runs in the tournament till the 36^th match. In addition took all the bowlers who have taken 9 or more wickets till now. And see the table that I got. The number of top performing batsmen + bowlers in the tournament correlates extremely well with the inverse of ranking (10 – Rank on the points table). An amazing correlation of 78%. Strongly suggesting that in a tournament team performance is more important than just one individual.

You can see if 4-5 players have performed well then the team is also doing well.

Team	Bowlers	Batsmen	Total	Inverse Ranking
RCB	2	2	4	9
CSK	3	2	5	8
RR	2	3	5	7
SRH	4	0	4	6
KXIP	2	1	3	5
MI	1	2	3	4
KKR	2	2	4	3
PWI	0	1	1	2
DD	1	1	2	1

RCB has Kohli batting well besides Gayle. CSK has 3 bowlers besides Hussey and Dhoni batting well. Surprising is the SRH team that has 4 bowlers and no batsmen doing well in the tournament and are in top 4. Again if SRH get their batting act right like in match 36 against RR, they will be dangerous. PWI and DD have at the bottom of the table for the same reason. Exception is KKR. And I believe that all exceptions prove the rule.

Hope you make some sense of my analytics and tend to agree that T20 is a team game.

Keep watching IPL and this space.

All data used above is till match 36^th played on 27^th April 2013 (first match)

PS: You can also reach me out at @agrawalsanjeev on twitter.