IPL: India’s star batters have piled on the runs but have they been as impactful?

Maybe, maybe not.

First, let’s understand what ‘had it easier’ means in this context. It doesn’t mean they get easier balls or that boundaries are pulled in for them. It means they get away with less impactful batting.

If you see the batting charts, Virat Kohli sits at the top with 7,043 runs. He is the first and only batter in the history of the IPL to cross the 7k milestone. Shikhar Dhawan is second with 6,593 runs.

In the top-10 list, there are seven Indians and three foreigners.

All these stats make it look like the star Indian batters have been fantastic in the IPL. In a way, they have been good. Scoring those many runs requires consistency, year after year.

But the Twenty20 format is as much about consistency as it is about scoring rate. In fact, some consider the scoring rate as the most important aspect.

To understand, let’s take an example. For a team that is hoping to set or chase down a target of 200, their batters need to collectively score at a strike rate of 166.67. Understandably, every batter is not going to score at that rate. Some will score at a lower clip and others at a higher. Keeping all that in mind, which innings do you reckon is going to be more impactful for the batting side: a 40-ball 50 or a 15-ball 30?

Clearly, 50 is more than 30 but the fact that the number of balls is so limited, the latter is going to have a higher impact. There are more factors that come into play, like the fall of wickets, but in a 120-ball game, consuming one-third of the balls for scoring only one-fourth of the runs is a crime. It leaves the team behind the required rate and forces other batters to score at a strike rate of 207.50.

Consider the case of Kohli in the May 6 game against Delhi Capitals at the Feroz Shah Kotla stadium. He scored 55 to be the top-scorer for RCB in the match. But those runs came off 46 balls, resulting in a strike rate of merely 119.56. It was significantly lower than the team’s collective strike rate (run rate / 6 x 100) of 150.84. Kohli consumed 38 per cent of the balls available to RCB but scored only 30 per cent of the team’s total of 181. As it turned out, Capitals chased down the target in just 16.4 overs and all their batters struck at above 150.

That’s one of the reasons why KL Rahul has been facing a lot of criticism lately. His batting average of 46.77 is the best among those who have played at least 20 matches in the IPL but his strike rate of 134.42 is ordinary.

In recent times, stat padding has become part of discourse in cricket circles. Stat padding is the tendency of batters to cut down on risk and preserve his wicket at the cost of scoring rate. It helps batters bulk up their runs section, which in older days was the most important parameter to judge a batter’s quality. But in T20 cricket, it’s a problem as it puts the team at a disadvantage.

Coming back to the point, strike rate is the holy grail of T20 batting and much more important than batting average. But, over the years, it is where the star Indian batters have lagged behind their overseas counterparts.

Both Kohli and Dhawan – the top two run-scorers – have a sub-130 career strike rate. In fact, all the Indian batters in the top 10 run-scorers have a strike rate below 137 – Suresh Raina with an SR of 136.76 is at the top. Even if you extend the search to top 20, only Sanju Samson does slightly better and strikes at 137.08.

In comparison, all three foreigners in the top 10 have a career strike rate above 139 – AB de Villers struck at 151.68.

There are 22 players who have scored more than 3,000 runs in the IPL so far. Out of them, 15 are Indians and 7 overseas. Only two Indians among them have a career strike above 140 – Yusuf Pathan (142.97) and Suryakumar Yadav (141.45) – while four overseas batters have a 145-plus strike rate. A fifth one – David Warner (139.39) – is also within a touching distance of 140.

Not just strike rate, the overseas stars have also outperformed the Indians in the average race. All the three foreigners among the top 10 run-scorers have better averages than Indians.

For those who are still not convinced that foreign batters have outshone Indian batters despite being less in numbers, here are some more numbers for you. In the 15 completed seasons so far, an overseas batter has been the top run-scorer 10 times. This year again, it seems, a foreigner will top the batting charts – Faf du Plessis has a one-run lead over second-placed Yashasvi Jaiswal.

Protectionism is an economic concept that refers to policies of putting various tariffs and restrictions on the foreign industries to give the domestic ones some advantage. But it has some disadvantages also. In the long run, it affects the competitiveness and innovativeness of the locals.

The IPL also employs a version of protectionism by putting a restriction on the number of overseas players a team can put on the ground. It means the cricketers from all over the world are fighting for just 40 places (4 each in 10 teams), while Indians have 70 spots. The BCCI has its reasons for those restrictions and there needs deeper research to ascertain whether the limit on the overseas players has resulted in Indian star batters, barring a few, falling behind in T20 batting innovation race.

The statistics, however, show that despite piling on the runs, Indian batters have so far gotten away with less impactful performances.