All Captains In The IPL Are Equally Good
This is a postscript, not a sequel, to my previous post here about captaincy in the modern professional international game. The evidence there indicated that captaincy has no effect on outcomes in international cricket. As I write this on Douglas Jardine’s 121st birthday, its worth pointing out, that there have been captains like Jardine (and the current England white ball captain Eoin Morgan) who have advanced the game by demonstrating new possibilities within it.
But this is not captaincy on the field. Jardine and Morgan’s contributions in the Test and ODI arenas have been about identifying more efficient ways of competing and building sides to play that way. Each overcame the conventional wisdom of his day in the process. But this was not about on-field inspiration. This was akin to the invention of the googly or the switch-hit.
Its possible to evaluate performance in T20 on a ball by ball basis by comparing the outcome on a delivery to the expected (in the 1st innings) or required (in the 2nd innings) outcome from that delivery. The required scoring rate in the 2nd innings is self-explanatory.
In the first innings, the expected scoring rate used here is given by the average runs scored on a delivery given how many deliveries are remaining and how many wickets are in hand. For example, the expected runs on a delivery with 100 balls remaining and 9 wickets in hand is 1.206, while the expected runs on a delivery with 55 balls remaining and 9 wickets in hand is 1.318.
On the field, in the IPL, all captains who have captained for any length of time (2000 balls or more each, bowling first and second), have presided over outcomes which demonstrate nothing beyond the fact that some of them played more high scoring games than others.
The columns in the tables below are as follows:
B: Balls bowled.
ONE: The average percentage change in expected or asking run rate (+ve figures indicate an increase in the expectation/requirement).
TWO: Percentage on deliveries on which the position of the bowling side declines (i.e. deliveries on which the expectation/requirement is less than the expectation/requirement on the previous ball)
THREE: Average percentage improvement in bowling team’s position on deliveries where there is a improvement in the bowling team’s position..
FOUR: Average percentage decline in bowling team’s position on deliveries where there is an decline in the bowling team’s position.
What these tables show is that not only are all captains in the IPL equally good, but that all captains in the IPL basically approach games in the same way. There is no captain in the IPL who puts three slips and chases wickets. If there was, there would be variety in these figures. The distribution of totals conceded with such a strategy would be different from the distribution of totals conceded by a strategy which is as defensive as possible. As it happens, all of them use the field restrictions in the same way.
There is a lot of chatter about tactical details in T20 games. But the game is basically simple. The bowling side has one task - to minimize the number of boundaries scored by the batting side. There are patterns of lines and length allied with field settings which are designed to achieve this. Success depends on how well these are implemented on the field. Captaincy doesn’t come into it. Or rather, if captains err in deciding which pattern to use when, they all err roughly equally. There isn’t any one captain who is measurably better or worse than any other.
Better batters score faster than worse batters in T20. Better bowlers concede fewer boundaries than worse bowlers in T20. Better captains don’t exist.
Will there be a T20 equivalent of Jardine (in Test cricket) or Morgan (in ODI cricket) at some point? Probably. But there hasn’t been one yet. Not in the IPL at any rate.