Jaipur, April 03: Who’s been the most valuable player of IPL 3 so far? With a little over half the league matches played (till the Knight Riders-Deccan Chargers match on Thursday night), our vote goes to Yusuf Pathan followed by Jacques Kallis and Sachin Tendulkar.
You might not find this particularly surprising, but wait till you hear the rest of the top 10 – Andrew Symonds, Dinesh Karthik, David Warner, Adam Gilchrist, Chaminda Vaas, Irfan Pathan and Harbhajan Singh, in that order.
You might baulk at some of these names, but read on to find out how we came up with this list.
Before you do, here’s something to chew on. For all the talk about T20 being entirely a batsman’s game, notice that there are only two pure batsmen among these 10 Sachin and Warner while Vaas is here purely as a bowler and Harbhajan too is on this list largely on the strength of his bowling performance.
For the most part though, it is allrounders – those contributing with bat and ball, or bat and keeping gloves – who provide the best value to their teams.
Here is what these rankings are based on: We assigned batting, bowling and fielding points to each player based on his performance. We also assigned captaincy points based on team performances to those who have led their side. We then totalled up all of these points.
The batting points were worked out on the principle that T20 cricket is not only about how much you score, but how fast you get the runs.
We, therefore, worked out the average strike rate for all batsmen in the IPL so far, which turned out to be nearly 130. The number of batting points each player got was the runs scored by him multiplied by his strike rate and divided by the average strike rate of 130.
Thus, a batsman scoring at the average strike rate of 130 gets as many points as the runs he has scored. Faster scorers will get more points than they have runs, while relatively slow scorers will have fewer points than runs.
The bowling points were based on the principle that economy and wicket taking are both important. Again, the average economy rate of all bowlers so far, roughly 8 runs per over, was taken as par. Any bowler going at this rate got no economy points. Those conceding fewer runs per over got as many points as the runs they notionally saved.
For instance, if a bowler had bowled 20 overs in the tournament at 5 runs per over, he would have saved 60 runs in all 20 multiplied by 8 minus 5. Of course, those with a higher economy rate than the average were treated as having conceded additional runs and hence earned as many negative points.
As for the wicket-taking points, we just multiplied the number of wickets taken by 25. The total of a player’s bowling points then was the sum of his economy and wicket-taking points. Happily for us, this gave us results in which the top bowlers had points of about the same level as the top batsmen. We then added on fielding points.
The principle here was that wicket-keepers should be treated differently since their primary role in the side is a fielding role. Thus, they were assigned 25 points for every dismissal, caught, stumped or run out. Other fielders got 10 points for every catch and 15 for every run-out.
Finally, we gave captains 25 points for each win and deducted 25 for every loss. Thus, Tendulkar with six wins and one loss gets 125 captaincy points, whereas Shane Warne with four wins and four losses gets none and Sangakkara with one win and five losses gets minus 100.
All this done, it was a simple matter of adding up batting, bowling, fielding and captaincy points to arrive at the total for each player. Since players have not played the same number of matches, we then divided these totals by the number of matches each player has played to get a points per match figure, which provided the basis for the rankings.
We imposed a cut-off mark of at least five matches to ensure that one or two good performances by a player wouldn’t unduly skew the results.
The results of all this number crunching are for you to judge. There are bound to be some rankings you disagree with, but then it is impossible to come up with an index that can be quantitatively rigorous and yet satisfy everybody’s subjective evaluation.
P.S.: While we knocked out those who had played less than five matches, the cases of Farveez Maharoof in Delhi and Shadab Jakati in Chennai are worth mentioning. Both would have been within the top 10 except for the fact that they had not played enough matches.
Perhaps the Delhi Daredevils and Chennai Super Kings managements have missed a trick or two.
-Agencies