Cricket is Dead. Who Needs Bowlers Anyway?

​ In the last week or two, I watched the followers bowling all play:

• Mukesh Choudhary (Chennai)

• Raghu Sharma (Mumbai)

• Kartik Tyagi (Kolkata)

• Anakul Roy (Kolkata)

• Shivang Kumar (Hyderabad)

• Brijesh Sharma (Rajasthan)

• Ramakrishna Ghosh (Chennai)

• Krish Bhagat (Mumbai)

• Sakib Hussain (Hyderabad)

• Praful Hinge (Hyderabad)

What do all these players have in common? They all cost less than 1 Crore, and are domestic Indian players. Most of those were 0.3 Crore, which is a touch under 0.25% of a team’s budget, meaning that, if not for the squad size cap, you could sign 400 of these guys. This strikes me as immediately odd from the perspective of a Premier League football fan. Someone would never start a Premier League match if they were valued so low compared to a team’s total expenses. Those sorts of players play for your under-21s or are loaned to 2nd and 3rd-tier clubs.

The slew of first-team player bargain-bin bowlers made me wonder what would happen if a franchise just… didn’t buy any bowlers who cost more than a Crore. Using Punjab as a baseline, since they are doing very well, a team needs 10-11 bowlers in its squad. Currently, it’s common to spend around 50 Crore of the 125 Crore budget on bowlers. Our theoretical “local bowlers nobody else particularly wants” team would average around 0.5 Crore per player.

That means the whole bowling attack would cost just 5 of the 125 Crore budget. It would also leave all 4 Overseas Player slots in the starting XI available for the top 7/8. This hypothetical franchise should, in theory, be able to bully their way to all the batters they want because they have a bigger purse than everyone else. It also has the added bonus of driving up the price on any batters they bid for but don’t want to overpay to secure.

What a 120 Crore all-in batting lineup could look like (Using players available at the 2025 Mega Auction):

-KL Rahul (14)

-Shubman Gill (16.5)

-Rajat Patidar (11)

-Yashasvi Jaiswal (18)

-Marcus Stoinis (11)

-Rinku Singh (13)

-David Miller (7.5)

-Suryakumar Yadav (16.5)

Those 8 still leave us 12 Crore spare to pick up some young backup batting talent, backup keeper, maybe an all-rounder, up to you. Playing all 8 of these at once wouldn’t work; logically, you’d go for 1 all-rounder and start 7 of the elite batters. Santner, Jacks, Ravindra and Jadeja are all well within budget; there would be ample choices.

Then your 12 is whichever 7 of those 8 batters are in best form, whichever of your 2 all-rounders is looking hottest and 4 of our budget bowlers. It’s undeniable that a team built like this could bat sensationally even when you exclude players unavailable because of retentions. It still would’ve been possible to build an absolutely stupid lineup last mega-auction as shown above. In this team, Stoinis or Rinku at 7 may have the best paydays of their lives, since it’s hard to imagine them being needed for more than an over a game, and honestly, you’d hope they are almost always coming in when the scoreboard already says 200-5.

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But… just how bad is this bowling going to be? Will it offset the brilliant batting? For this… I shall present some statistics. Our first problem is that we are going to need 4 overs every game from our Santner/Ravindra type, or make it up with an over or two of Stoinis’ Offies. Stoinis has bowled 5 overs this season so far and gone at 11/over. Santner is consistently better than that. This year has been his worst year so far, and he’s still only going at 8.92. If our 5th bowler is something like 3 overs of Santner, 1 of Stoinis, you’re looking at around 1/38 as their combined average figures.

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Then we get onto the real meat of the challenge: How much worse is the Budget Boys Brigade than a real frontline attack?

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To work this out, I’m going to take every pace bowler listed in the intro of the article and average their results this season, and multiply this by 3 to assume we have picked 3 Median ‘Promising Pacers’. Shivang Kumar will represent our spinner (our all-rounder will be spin, so this creates a 3-2 split). We will then compare these results against the bowling stats of the best and worst teams in the league (Punjab and Lucknow). All numbers provided in Table 2 have been calculated using data from this season only, to provide a rough image of the bowling disparity or indeed lack of disparity.

Our Bowling Attack	Punjab’s Bowling Attack	Lucknow’s Bowling Attack
Averaged Promising Pacer 1	Marco Jansen	Mohsin Khan
Averaged Promising Pacer 2	Arshdeep Singh	Mohammed Shami
Averaged Promising Pacer 3	Vijaykumar Vyshak	Avesh Khan
Shivang Kumar	Yuzvendra Chahal	Prince Yadav
Santner / Stoinis	Xavier Bartlett	Digvesh Rathi

Trying to describe what Lucknow’s 5-person bowling attack is was immensely difficult, which I think says a fair bit about what’s up with that franchise.

Team	Our Bowling Attack	Punjab’s Bowling Attack	Lucknow’s Bowling Attack
Combined Average Economy	9.8	10.33	9.4
Combined Average Wickets per Game	4.6	4.7	5.1
% Chance a player is hit for >14/over in a match	60%	57%	48%

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What does this suggest?

Well, it suggests firstly Punjab have played on much easier to bat on pitches than Lucknow, who have better bowling figures despite being at the bottom of the table. The first 2 rows also demonstrate that the raw numbers of our hypothetical budget bowlers are in the ballpark of a proper IPL attack, despite being 10% of the price. Unsurprisingly, the chance of someone having a disaster game (14+ RPO) is higher with these mostly inexperienced, cheap players.

The case in favour…

On paper using these (admittedly rudimentary) numbers, this auction strategy is amazing, you buy 11 local talents you’ve scouted, you give them all a good lengthy time in the nets and with the team and you pick the 5 that look the best to throw into the games (varying which 4 of the 5 play each game with pitch conditions/,matchups). You only bowl marginally worse than the standard IPL team, concede 8 runs a game more (0.4 RPO x 20) than Lucknow and then deploy the best batting lineup in IPL history that will knock off that 8 runs in a couple of balls.

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The scouting strategy seems realistic because many of these debutants are not young, which shows there is close-to-IPL-ready talent out there at all ages, massively widening the pool of potential signings to snap up. If you decide a year out from the auction you’ll do this strategy you don’t need to do any batting scouting because you’re just going to sign the biggest best guys, so you funnel all your resources into hunting for the bowlers, you find 25-35 of the most promising 2nd tier guys around, you swoop up a dozen of them for 0.3-0.9 Lakhs a piece. Done.

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The budget being available for 2 serious all-rounders and an extra world-class batter means if 2-3 games into the season it’s clear someone like Rinku Singh isn’t firing… fine, you’ve got someone like Miller or Stoinis on the bench ready. It’s also commonly acknowledged that batting deep helps the guys at the top play better, and if you’ve got a world all-stars team down to 8, then it’s your duty to hit with high intent.

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I watched Virat Kohli slow down in a game where some commentators were suggesting if it were any player but Kohli you would retire him out, but you can’t retire out someone like Kohli, Jaiswal, Gill etc… but I’d argue if there’s ever a way you can retire out a big name for chewing up balls, it’s when you’ve got massive stars/big names as your closers. You can’t retire out Jaiswal for Donovan Ferreira, but he might accept it for Suryakumar Yadav or Stoinis.

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So there we have it, someone should do this next auction. They’ll bowl okay, chase amazingly and set eyewatering first innings totals. Job Done. If any franchise wants me at their table next auction, feel free to email me. ([email protected])

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Okay, maybe the numbers hide some things…

What The Numbers Do Not Say - Why You Shouldn’t Do This

These numbers hide how much your bowling attack partners help you bowl. For example: In the 19th over of Kolkata vs Rajasthan, budget boy Kartik Tyagi took 3 wickets for only 2 runs. A dream over massively influenced by Chakravarthy and Narine, absolutely shutting down the middle overs. At 144/5 after 18, Rajasthan knew they were going to set a score well below par.

Ball 1, Jadeja tries to hook him for 6, finds the fielder on the rope. Wicket two was another huge swing, angled bat, top-edged and caught. The new batter is the number 9, who then demonstrates why he isn’t in the top 8, and takes multiple slashing misses before edging. Had Tyagi come in to bowl, and it was 190-3 (because the bowling attack is weaker), that over never happens because the batters aren’t panicking to hit everything for 6.

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Relatedly, a few of these young bowlers are given more favourable overs to bowl; their numbers may be slightly too generous, with their captains inclined to turn to the elites when things are mission-critical and sneak the novices who are currently being used as 3rd-5th options into the safer overs. An example would be if you’re defending 36 runs off the last 2 overs, you bowl your #1 Jofra Archer-type pacer in the 19th, trusting they will survive the scary over with low runs, and leave them needing 25+ in the final over, making the rookie’s job easy in the 20th. In that scenario, if you bowl the rookie in the 19th, they would be expected to concede way more runs than they do in the games-already-over 20th. The problem with our strategy is that there is no hiding; it’s a newcomer who’s got to step up and not get hit for 15+ in the 19th.

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The next issue is that really high 14/over+ performance risk. Normally, if someone gets hit for 14+ off their first 3, you find someone else to bowl the 4th over because they are in trouble. In a setup like this, you already have to bowl your all-rounder for 4 overs, so you’re forced to see out all 4 overs of an inexperienced guy getting smashed. Psychologically, there’s a real risk this team starts to collapse if it’s all inexperienced voices, and they have a bad powerplay and lack the veterans, confidence or all-rounder backup to bail them out. If one of the bowlers goes 0-78, it won’t matter that the rest of the team should average 9.2 an over, 1 collapse is enough to lose a game.

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Another related issue is leadership. This is why I was so keen to put Santner as a suggested all-rounder; the team badly needs a leader in the bowling attack, every team does. If everyone’s pretty new to the league, who is going to help the other bowlers with plans and fields to finish out an over if the first 3 balls go for 12? In this scenario, we are banking on our Mitch Santner to be that guy, or the batting captain, to think like a bowler. I don’t think this rules out the plan, but it makes it mission-critical to get exactly the right kind of all-rounder, to herd his fellow bowlers.

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Since this section is already getting long, I won’t talk too much about pitches. But this strategy does risk opponents strategically preparing pitches to suit high skill seamers/swing bowlers and trying to skittle you out for 140 and argue that you don’t have the bowling talent to do the same back. Perhaps the batting all-stars would be enough to dig you out of that pit, but it would have to be seriously considered as a risk.

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Lastly, I made the case that with the bumper budget, our hypothetical franchise can just bully everyone else in the batting market, pay big for the guys we buy, and drive up prices for the players we are interested in but don’t need. The problem is that auction bullying can go 2 ways. If it becomes clear your franchise is going to only leave 5.5 Crore for the uncapped Indian domestics, who come at the end of the auction, a team with a little bit more purse spare can bully you pretty easily, by just adding a measly 0.5 Crore to the price tag for all your guys.

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Unless the list of youth bowlers you are happy to sign is double the number you need, it could be a long night of the other teams taking it in turn to drive up your budget bowlers to 1 Crore each, at which point you totally can’t afford to buy them. This can be mitigated slightly by the fact that some top all-rounders in the last auction went after many of the uncapped Indians in the auction order. You could pair this with the franchise’s ability to nominate players for auction. If this mega bowling scouting mission were done, I believe it would be possible to nominate lots and lots of players into the auction, to help increase options, and stop teams from bullying you off of them all. Price gouging 5 players just to screw you is viable for the other teams, but they can’t swipe 50, or they’ll bankrupt themselves. All that being said, this requires a serious effort to find all that talent.

Conclusion

I honestly think that the existing data suggests this strategy is close enough to viable that it’s worth a team with more detailed data considering. Or perhaps it would be more tempting to 90% commit to this plan, and go for a 110/15 Crore split batting/bowling expenditure, and pair the band of rookies with 1 elite frontline bowler.

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There are enough caveats to suggest that it could be a real problem in practice, despite the promise on paper. If it goes wrong, even the numbers confess it could go really wrong. You could be the first franchise to concede 300. The good thing, though, that does make it worth looking at, or at least the 100-110 and 15-25 split ratio, is that you aren’t really all in. If it goes disastrously for a year, you can just pick which of your batters has disappointed you the most, and not retain them for next year’s mini-auction and use the 10-20 crore saved to get bowlers and ease back towards a more normal composition.

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Does this mean bowling is dead? No. Does the skill of the uncapped Indian domestic players suggest they should be used more… I’d argue yes. The trend of the game is already to pay more for the biggest smashers with the bat, and our hypothetical team suggests it could skew that way further in future. If more than one team took this approach of relying heavily on sub-1 Crore bowlers, it would drive down the price of the big gun bowlers to the point where they become the real bargain once again.

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If you’ve made it to the end of this piece, thank you for your patience in hearing out this monstrosity of a thought experiment. Feel free to send me your own ridiculous IPL thought experiments, for future articles or just because you want to show off your monstrosities. ​