Cooper, Rahane best value for money in IPL 5
rajasthanroyals.comWho's the most valuable player of IPL's fifth season so far? Our analysis suggests that Kieron Pollard is ahead of the rest with fellow West Indian Kevon Cooper in second spot and Munaf Patel in third.
But when it comes to the best value for money, the list is dramatically different with only Cooper at the top figuring in both lists and little-known Kolkata stumper Manvinder Bisla in second spot followed by Rajasthan's Ajinkya Rahane.
And the biggest duds of the tournament so far, the ones who have proved to be least value for money are those who command annual fees of a million dollars or more - Yusuf Pathan, one of the stars of the first season, heads the list followed by Saurabh Tiwary and Virat Kohli.
Of course, it's still early days with only a quarter of the league matches played till Sunday and things could change as the fearless play of the early rounds gives way to more pressure cooker games. Watch this space as the list changes over the next few weeks.
Interestingly, the list of top performers and of the best buys includes pure batsmen like Rahane, pure bowlers like Siddharth Trivedi and all-rounders like Cooper. Clearly, T20 is not quite the sole preserve of bits-and-pieces players.
Notice also that half of the list of the 10 best value-for-money players includes five from Rajasthan. That explains why they are sitting on top of the table after the first quarter of the league and is reminiscent of the first IPL season when Shane Warne led a team of little-known local and international players to the title. This time round, a Rahul Dravid free of the responsibilities of India duty seems to be replicating the same act.
But what's the basis for these rankings? 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 totaled 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 very nearly 120. 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 120.
Thus, a batsman scoring at the average strike rate of 120 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 7.5 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 5.5 runs per over, he would have saved 40 runs in all - 20 multiplied by 7.5 minus 5.5. Of course, those with a higher economy rate 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 15 points for every catch or run-out they caused and 25 for each stumping. 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, Sourav Ganguly with three wins and one loss gets 75 captaincy points, whereas Daniel Vettori gets minus 50.
All this done, it was a simple matter of adding up batting, bowling, fielding and captaincy points and divide by the number of matches each player has played to get the top performers.
We then took into account the fact that different players are paid very different amounts, ranging from $50,000 per annum to over $2 million annually for some of the marquee players. So we divided the points per match by the fees per match to get how many points each player was getting for every thousand dollars of fees.
The results of these exercises are for you to judge, but no statistical measure of performance can fully grasp the subtleties of cricket or satisfy everybody's subjective impression of how valuable different players are.
