Category Archives: twenty20

Mumbai Indians and Cheating

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Ducking Beamers links to this controversy about Suryakumar Yadav, who apparently forgot the script and went and scored a big unbeaten century days after he was removed from the Mumbai Indians team because of injury. It looks pretty silly for the Mumbai Indians, but I think there are better explanations than the Mumbai management trying to cheat to win the Champions League.

The more innocent explanation is that the Mumbai Indians had a higher standard for playing in the tournament. Very likely to some extent since we are talking about an international club tournament. If Yadav had been out of shape, he may have failed a fitness test. Also a batsman selected for one of the top IPL teams in the country would obviously have some talent. Playing in an under-22 tournament would be easy pickings for him. I remember when we used to play street cricket and if an “older brother” came along and asked to allow him to play, we would ask him to play left-handed or give the other team extra batsmen so that there was no unfair advantage.

Another explanation is that the business people felt that Suryakumar Yadav was one of the more dispensable members of the team and they would want someone who had a more recognizable name. I am not sure that the current team fielded by the Mumbai Indians does achieve more pull, but maybe that was their thinking.

In any case, I don’t think that Mumbai cheated to gain an advantage. To gain one extra player would not have been enough. Also, the lack of complaining by the other teams shows that this was not a big deal in their opinion.

Too Many Close Matches at the Champions League Twenty20

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So here are the results of the matches played so far:

  • Warriors won by 3 wickets (with 0 balls remaining)
  • Cape Cobras won by 7 wickets (with 16 balls remaining)
  • Mumbai Indians won by 3 wickets (with 1 ball remaining)
  • Warriors won by 50 runs
  • Somerset won by 5 wickets (with 2 balls remaining)
  • Mumbai Indians won by 1 wicket (with 0 balls remaining)
  • South Australia won by 19 runs
  • Match tied (New South Wales won the one-over eliminator)
  • Chennai Super Kings won by 4 wickets (with 2 balls remaining)

Out of 9 matches so far, 6 matches have gone to the wire with the match being decided with 2 balls or less remaining and one match even going to the Super Over. What the heck is going on? A few theories:

  • Unlike national teams (Australia v Bangladesh), players of the same level of skills are not playing on the same team, so teams are more evenly matched.
  • Twenty20 is a format that allows teams to come back from the dead. So the chasing team can attempt a dying burst of crazy strokes after being placed in an impossible position and still come back to win.
  • There is massive fraud happening so that the organizers can make this a more meaningful tournament.

I am more inclined towards the last theory, but I cannot see how you can get so many people to play along without any rumors leaking out. Still the whole thing makes little sense statistically.

Dhoni’s Misfortune Continues

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I was not intending to post much on the Champions League. For some reason, it doesn’t seem as compelling as the IPL. But they had a few interesting games, especially the one between Chennai Super Kings and Mumbai Indians, where the latter seemed all at sea until some lusty hitting by Lasith Malinga in the last few overs took Mumbai past the finish line.

When the tour from hell ended for India in England where they failed to win every single international match, I thought the nightmare was over for Mahendra Singh Dhoni. It was the only major aberration in a spectacularly successful captaincy career. So perhaps he would get back to India and then captain CSK to the Champions League trophy and set everything back on track again. And then beat England in the return ODI series and so on.

But things don’t seem to be going according to plan back in heaven. Chennai lost their first home game of the season. And Dhoni missed a stumping of the eventual match-winner Malinga at a crucial time in the match. In the England series, there were times when India had the upper hand, but failed to take advantage. The story seems to be repeating.

Hopefully, this is not the start of a trend. CSK did show good form throughout the match and they should be able to take it and win the next few to reach the semis. Mike Hussey has been able to carry on the good form in the Sri Lanka test series to the Twenty20 match. As long as Chennai can win the next few, …

Kolkata Qualify for Champions League Next Phase, Huh?

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What a strange qualifying tournament for the Champions League! You have 6 teams, only 3 of which will advance to the next round. And what do the organizers do? They create two groups of three teams in which the group toppers advance, but then the 2nd placed teams are compared to obtain the 3rd qualifier.

Weren’t there other alternatives such as:

  • Have a single group of 6 teams and the top three go on to the next stage.
  • Have the 2nd placed teams play an extra match against each other.
  • Let all the teams into the main tournament and increase the number of groups.

Why have these meaningless 6 matches in the first place? Well, the real reason is so that there are 4 Indian teams out of 10 playing in the tournament which is hosted in India. So in the initial stages, 14 of the 20 matches will feature an Indian team and that will increase the viewer ratings (hopefully).

But Kolkata needed to qualify to fit the organizer’s plans. They needed to win at least one match and only lose the other by a small margin or so. They managed to just barely win the first match and in the second, they knew how much they needed to score (if they lost) to make the cut off. Whereas if there was an actual playoff, maybe they wouldn’t have fared so well.

Pitiable and one reason why Twenty20 continues to earn little respect.

IPL Chart Ordering

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Karthikeya criticizes the in-progress IPL Points Chart:

If it is the purpose of a chart to tell us how the teams are doing at any given point in a league, then how can a team with 10 points in 7 games be doing worse than a team with 10 points in 8 games as the IPL’s current charts show?

As some people in the comments have pointed out, this convention is used in many leagues across the world. But that is not necessarily a good justification. If the system is bad, then it should be changed. However, I do think that the way this method is superior to the alternative method of ranking the teams by points and then by reverse order of games played. Let me illustrate with an example. Take 2 teams, Chennai and Punjab

Chennai: 8 matches played, 8 points, NRR 1.232
Punjab: 7 matches played, 8 points, NRR 0.500

This is the order that Karthikeya has problems with. He wants Punjab to be ranked above Chennai because Punjab cannot “be doing worse” than a team that has the same number of points, but played more games. Punjab has a game in hand and they should be rewarded for scoring more points per game played.

The fallacy here is that Punjab has, in fact, not done better than Chennai. It has won exactly the same number of matches as Chennai and those matches have not been won with as much ease as Chennai. Punjab has a game in hand, but it has not earned those points yet and could very well lose the next game. We should not be rewarding Punjab for something it has not yet done.

Here is what we happens in each method based on the next game that Punjab plays:

Result NRR Method Games Left Method
Punjab Wins Punjab Goes Ahead No Change
Punjab Ties Punjab Goes Ahead No Change
Punjab Loses No Change Punjab Falls Behind*

I put a * for the last item because if Chennai was at 8 points from 9 matches, then there would not be any change. Even though that is not the example.

In any case, the concept with the NRR Method is that you get punished for actual poor performance in the games you played and rewarded for improving upon them. In the Games Left Method, you get rewarded for possible better performance in the future and punished for not meeting the expectations. So ultimately, it depends on your philosophy of looking at things.

Is Twenty20 a Sprinter Version of Tests

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I had a short exchange with Golandaaz on Ducking Beamers about T20 versus Tests. He suggested that Twenty20 versus Tests was like sprints versus marathons. I said that they didn’t make much sense as those are individual events. Then he countered that a 4 x 100 race was a team event. So I thought I would write a post about it.

First, the analogy to athletic races is wrong. A 100 meter dash is obviously an individual event. And a 4 x 100, while being a team event, is actually a collection of individual events, the only team aspect of it being the order in which the sprinters run and at the moment they pass the baton. Each sprinter is supposed to run as fast as they can in their leg. And when they are doing their stuff, the other persons in the team just watch. It is just aggregating the individual performances.

But a cricket match is not like that. It is a match played by 11 players with different players having different roles and contributing at the same time to the outcome. This is especially true and obvious while fielding, but also true during batting. How many times have you got run out because your partner was ball watching? How about when a team tries desperately not to give away a single off the last ball of the over so that they can get the worse batsman on strike?

In a Test match, the collective performance of the team matters a lot. As the match is spread across several days, you see the strengths of the team members adding up. 1 + 1 becomes greater than 2. That is the reason why a strong team like Australia rakes up whitewashes after whitewashes while Bangladesh cannot win a match to save their lives. In a Twenty20 match, an individual lucky performance can make a huge difference regardless of the team’s capability. That is why you saw Zimbabwe beating Australia in a Twenty20.

Why is that? It is because of the shortened time duration. In Tests, you have an option to “do nothing”, i.e., don’t score runs and just wait, or don’t try to take wickets and bowl wide. But in Twenty20, you don’t have that option. You have to do the maximum off every ball. If there is a small chance you can hit it for a six, you better do it. Whether the ball deserves the treatment or not is completely irrelevant. Even if a bowler is bowling the perfect line and length, the batsman has to do something. That increases the element of luck. It is true that talented batsmen like Gayle and Tendulkar are doing well at the IPL, but you also have someone like Valthaty scoring more than Sehwag, or Dhawan scoring more than Gilchrist.

The length of a Twenty20 can confuse this issue sometimes. You may look at a 90-minute soccer match and think that a T20 match is similar to a soccer match. That is not so. Since soccer is a continuous game unlike a ball-by-ball as in cricket, you cannot compare the two. In regular time, the teams have enough time to appraise their opponents and look for strategic openings or rapid counterattacks. If you treat a regular-time soccer match like a Test match, a Twenty20 match is like an overtime half of a soccer match using a Golden Goal eliminator. Doesn’t mean it doesn’t have its own charms, but it is a different game altogether.

Chennai Dynasty?

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Although I had written in my previous post that Chennai can only be called a “consistently good team“, if they win this final (which given their home record is the more likely result), it becomes a different story. That would mean:

  • 2 trophies in 4 tournaments
  • Thrice in the finals
  • All four times in the semis

It might not be a flawless performance in the league stage, but it is still a formidable record. Of course, the last two points are still true. This is indeed the third time Chennai has reached the finals. And lest I forget, Rajasthan won the first IPL off the last ball of the match. So Chennai could have been easily 2-time IPL winners on the cusp of winning their third.

Interestingly if Mumbai makes the finals, it will be a repeat of last years, except that unlike last year’s venue of Mumbai, this final will be played in Chennai. Will Mumbai win one for Tendulkar?! I just hope this year’s final doesn’t end with the chasing team playing out a maiden in their first over.

Punjab Players Could Have Been Devastated

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Assume that Punjab had won its last match against Deccan, ending up at 16 points with a Net Run Rate greater than its 0.271 which it had before the match. What that meant was that if Mumbai had lost its last match, its NRR of 0.033 would ensure Mumbai’s elimination on NRR against Punjab. Kolkata having a much better NRR of 0.433 would have to lose by record margins to be in danger. So the Punjab team would have been glued to their televisions praying for Mumbai to lose.

Now imagine you are a Punjab player watching the match. You watch Kolkata pile up 175 runs. Not an insurmountable total, but still a formidable one. Mumbai start reasonably well, but they are never running away with the match. Then wickets start to fall. The big ones – Sharma, Tendulkar. You are starting to feel more confident with every ball. The run rate starts creeping up beyond 12, which means that Mumbai has to take 2 runs with every ball or hit 3 boundaries per over. Usually a safe place to be. But the match is still in the balance as Mumbai enter the final two overs with 30 runs required.

Penultimate over. Glory. Only 9 runs. Final over – 21 runs required. When was the last time anyone ever did that, even in an IPL. Maybe Rajasthan Royals once in a non-crunch match needing 18 runs in the last over? So you are happy, but knowing that nothing is over until it is over, you want it to be over so that you can start celebrating.

First ball – fluke four. Rats.
Second ball – Another fluke boundary. Gulp.
Third ball – What is happening?
Fourth ball – Don’t they know how to stop these boundaries.
Fifth ball – 5 off 2. Please God. OMG, it is only a single. And it takes Franklin off strike. Yipee!
Last ball – 4 off 1. He cannot do it, right? I hope they won’t concede another boundary off an edge. Here it goes.

(Noise of a hard object shattering the television screen)

Thankfully, Punjab crashed out without all the drama.

IPL Playoff History

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Ducking Beamers poses a few questions:

1) Chennai Super Kings is a really, really good team. They’ve made it to four successive knock-out stages. Explanations?

2) Even though all eight of the original franchises (i.e., excluding Pune and Kochi) have now made it to the latter stage of the tournament, a franchise hierarchy is still apparent, and CSK, MI, RCB are on top of it. Given the common salary caps and the auction process, what explains this growing divergence? And, finally,

3) Just how badly did Delhi and Deccan screw up this time around?

If you look closely at the qualification in each IPL, the pattern seems to fade a tad:

         2011             2010            2009            2008

Bangalore (19)  Mumbai    (20)  Delhi     (20)  Rajasthan (22)
Chennai   (18)  Deccan    (16)  Chennai   (17)  Punjab    (20)
Mumbai    (18)  Chennai   (14)  Bangalore (16)  Chennai   (16)
Kolkata   (16)  Bangalore (14)  Deccan    (14)  Delhi     (15)

Punjab    (14)  Delhi     (14)  Punjab    (14)  Mumbai    (14)
Rajasthan (13)  Kolkata   (14)  Rajasthan (13)  Kolkata   (13)
Deccan    (12)  Rajasthan (12)  Mumbai    (11)  Bangalore  (8)
Kochi     (12)  Punjab     (8)  Kolkata    (7)  Deccan     (4)

Pune       (9)
Delhi      (9)

This is the first year that Chennai has qualified with a margin of 2 victories over a non-qualifier. Last year, when Chennai won the IPL, it came into the playoffs with the help of NRR. It has never dominated any IPL either, failing to top the league in 4 attempts. So while it is a good team in terms of getting to the playoffs, it cannot be classified as a “really, really good” team. Perhaps the right term would be a “consistently good” team.

It may be right to call CSK to be at the top of the IPL hierarchy across all editions. But not Bangalore. 2008 – they ended up almost at the bottom of the heap. In 2009, they were at the second last position until their 10th match when they put together a string of victories to make the playoffs. In 2010, they, like Chennai, scraped through on NRR, edging past Delhi on a mere 0.19 run rate difference. They topped the group this time, but once again, after a bad run initially. Making a big comeback isn’t necessarily a bad thing (after all, that is a lot of wins), but it demonstrates that if a couple of matches had gone a different way, we wouldn’t have seen Bangalore so often in the semis.

But this is a bit subjective. One naive way to decide this to add up the positions (1 to 8 or 10) for each IPL for each team and see what comes up. Chennai looks very good at 10 points (an average position of 2.5 every year). Bangalore and Mumbai are close together at 15 and 16 points. Punjab (20), Rajasthan (20), Delhi (20) and Deccan (21) form another group. Kolkata brings up the tail at 24 points. So Bangalore and Mumbai are mid-way between Chennai and the rest of the teams. I would suggest waiting for one more IPL to see which way things fall before awarding them more prestige.

As for Delhi and Deccan, in the whole scheme of things, they didn’t do so bad. The IPL low point is the 4 points out of 14 matches by Deccan in 2008. Delhi, in fact, has more points than the lowest team in all previous IPLs. In case you think that is because there are more teams this time, all the teams played the same number of matches (14) as in previous IPLs. This time, Deccan was a couple of wins away (and a good NRR) from making the playoffs.

One last point – there is no growing divergence, in fact the reverse. You can see this in the points table each year. The top-ranked team had 22 points in the league in 2008, that went down to 20 the last two years and this year, again lower at 19. The bottom-ranked team improved from 4 to 7 to 8 to 9 this year. The gap between the top and bottom has shrunk from 18 points to 10. Also after the inaugural IPL won by the top-placed team, the last two IPLs has been won by the 3rd and 4th qualifiers. We don’t know what will happen this year, but it is quite possible that Mumbai or Kolkata can repeat that this year too.

Shane Warne’s Last Professional Match

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It is nice to see Shane Warne ending his last professional cricket match by leading his team Rajasthan Royals to a big win over fancied Mumbai Indians. Also taking a wicket in last over. It would have been nicer if the Royals had qualified for the play-offs and he could have lead them to another IPL trophy. But you cannot have everything.

Shane Warne is among the few Australian cricketers I have come to liking. Generally, I start out disliking most Australian cricketers (except for some notables like Allan Border, Bruce Reid) and stay that way. The few that have changed my mind are Shane Warne, Glenn McGrath and Adam Gilchrist. No, I don’t like Ricky Ponting and I don’t think I will ever like Michael Clarke either, though he has time to try.

This almost ends the era of the master spinners, of whom Warne, Muralitharan and Kumble were primary. I am not sure where Murali stands on the whole retirement thing, but he will probably be wrapping up things soon enough. We don’t seem to have any bowlers approaching their caliber and probably won’t have for sometime.

Meanwhile, are Mumbai going to have the most gigantic hiccup to crash out the tournament after consistently topping the group for most of the time.

IPL 2011 Points Progression

After each round of matches, Mumbai was at the top in terms of points and was outright leader after the early matches. Now, after a few losses, they are one loss away from missing the playoffs, assuming Punjab keep up their surprising comeback.