The IPL's Most Valuable Player

This article has been cross-posted at Cricbuzz

Now that the IPL is done and dusted, we can all go back to our normal evening routines (even if there's a weirdly empty kind of feeling at 4 p.m. and you log on to Cricbuzz to check the latest score updates, only to figure out there is no match happening - not for the next week anyway).

We can think back to our favourite IPL memories - Shane Warne's ruffled look as he spun the ball in his hand before ripping one across the batsman; Anil Kumble's fiercely competitive streak that made the people who were calling for his head wonder why he retired; AB de Villier's masterful strokeplay and the rare delightful time when the commentary box was empty of Ravi Shastri, Ramiz Raja, Pommie Mbangwa, Ranjit Fernando and Danny Morrison.

However, discussions will continue unabated over who exactly were the 'best' players in this edition of the IPL. While there is no way to quantify the quality of runs scored or wickets taken, the pitch conditions and pressure situations et al, we can attempt to pull out numbers based on the quantity of runs scored, strike rates, economy rates and wickets taken.

Towards that end, this is an attempt to form an index for the 'Most Valuable Players' of the IPL.

Each player has been assigned points for batting, bowling and fielding, and the player with the highest number of points is, appropriately enough, IPL Version 2.0 MVP.

Batting Points:

The batting points were fairly straightforward to calculate. You have to take care of two parameters: the number of runs scored and the strike rate. The simplest way to do this is by multiplying one by the other, but there is a qualitatively better method and that is to calculate points based on the Relative Strike Rate.

The Relative Strike Rate is simply the ratio of a particular batsman's strike rate divided by the tournament's average strike rate. So if the average strike rate for the tournament has been 120.00 and Batsman A has a strike rate of 150.00, his relative strike rate would be 1.25.

The batting points are then assigned thus:

If R is the number of runs a batsman has scored, and S is his relative strike rate, the number of points B, the batsman will get is: B = R * S.

The only other thing that needs to be factored in to this is a batsman remaining 'Not Out' at the end of the innings. To make matters simple, every 'Not Out', contributes 10 runs to a batsman's score for the purpose of this analysis. Therefore, if N is the number of Not Outs, the formula becomes: B = (R+10N) * S

For IPL-2, the average strike rate has been 116.61.

The top 15 batsmen by this method, along with their batting point tallies per innings, are:

		Team	Runs	Strike Rate	B
1.	Matthew Hayden	Chennai	572	144.81	722.73
2.	Adam Gilchrist	Deccan	495	152.31	646.51
3.	AB de Villiers	Delhi	465	130.99	567.24
4.	Suresh Raina	Chennai	434	140.91	524.42
5.	T Dilshan	Delhi	418	122.58	470.92
6.	MS Dhoni	Chennai	332	127.20	416.69
7.	Brad Hodge	Kolkata	365	117.74	398.82
8.	Sachin Tendulkar	Mumbai	364	120.13	395.59
9.	JP Duminy	Mumbai	372	114.46	394.58
10.	Rohit Sharma	Deccan	362	114.92	386.31
11.	Herschelle Gibbs	Deccan	371	112.08	385.43
12.	Dinesh Karthik	Delhi	288	132.72	384.68
13.	Yuvraj Singh	Punjab	340	115.65	357.01
14.	Jacques Kallis	Bangalore	361	108.73	355.26
15.	Ross Taylor	Bangalore	280	134.62	346.31

Not too many surprises in the rankings, there! Most people would have probably had a similar list if asked to come up with their top 15 batsmen. However, it is nice to be able to put a number to the contributions of various batsmen.

The only team who doesn't have a batsman featuring here is Rajasthan. Their highest ranked batsman is Ravindra Jadeja who makes an appearance at No. 20 in the list.

Bowling Points:

For the bowlers, the parameters are slightly more complicated, as is the fact that straight multiplications will not work, because the lower a bowler's figures are, the better he has performed (a lower average/economy rate is better than a higher one).

The factors I have taken in account while awarding points for bowlers are:

1. The number of wickets taken and the strike rate

2. The number of balls bowled and the economy rate.

The reason for clubbing the factors as above is that for any given economy rate it is more credit-worthy for a bowler to sustain it over a higher number of balls - i.e. it carries greater weight to return an analysis of 4-0-16-0 than 1-0-4-0. The method followed is similar to that for the batsmen, and involves relative economy rates. The Relative Economy Rate (E) of a bowler is the tournament's average economy rate divided by his own. So if the tournament's average economy rate has been 8.00, and Bowler A has bowled his overs at 6.00, his Relative Economy Rate will be 1.33.

If O is the number of balls a bowler has bowled, he would then get O * E points for economy rate.

For his wickets, the points are assigned thus:

Each wicket will fetch him the number of points (W) that an average wicket has cost in the IPL, i.e. W = Total number of balls bowled/ Total number of wickets taken.

This would then be multiplied by his Relative Strike Rate (S1), which will function on the same principle as the Relative Batting Strike Rate, and the Relative Economy Rate. The reason the wickets taken are multiplied by the relative strike rate is so that a part-time bowler who might have picked up a stray wicket or two does not get inordinately rewarded for the same. Therefore the total number of points a bowler gets (B1) is:

B1 = (O*E) + (W*S1).

To homogenize the ratings between batsmen and bowlers, B1 is multiplied by a constant so that both can be measured on the same scale.

For IPL-2, the average economy rate has been 7.31, while the average strike rate for bowlers has been 21.07. Each wicket has been worth 25.67.

The top 15 bowlers, with their normalized ratings are:

		Team	Balls Bowled	Runs	Wickets	Econ Rate	Strike Rate	B1
1.	RP Singh	Deccan	358	417	23	6.99	15.57	480.53
2.	Anil Kumble	Bangalore	355	347	21	5.86	16.90	456.26
3.	Ashish Nehra	Delhi	306	346	19	6.78	16.11	396.24
4.	Lasith Malinga	Mumbai	297	312	18	6.30	16.50	382.61
5.	Pragyan Ojha	Deccan	321	348	18	6.50	17.83	371.22
6.	Munaf Patel	Rajasthan	209	241	16	6.92	13.06	361.66
7.	Irfan Pathan	Punjab	302	390	17	7.75	17.76	328.57
8.	Yusuf Abdulla	Punjab	168	241	14	8.61	12.00	316.77
9.	Muralitharan	Chennai	300	261	14	5.22	21.43	316.69
10.	Pradeep Sangwan	Delhi	280	360	15	7.71	18.67	286.58
11.	Dirk Nannes	Delhi	297	372	15	7.52	19.80	286.05
12.	Shadab Jakati	Chennai	174	217	13	7.48	13.38	284.68
13.	Amit Mishra	Delhi	252	294	14	7.00	18.00	279.98
14.	Shane Warne	Rajasthan	300	365	14	7.30	21.43	267.68
15.	Harbhajan Singh	Mumbai	264	256	12	5.82	22.00	256.60

There aren't too many surprises in this list too, though Lasith Malinga has suffered due to his team's early exit - a few more games and wickets and he could well have been heading the table. RP Singh just about manages to edge the titanic Anil Kumble into second place, and that is the beauty of numbers - though most people would pick Kumble as the bowler of the tournament, pure numbers without qualitative analysis give the crown to RP Singh.

The only thing that remains is to factor in the fielding points - which I have taken as 15 each for a catch or a stumping - and arrive at the combined value of each player in the IPL.

So, taking into account batting, bowling and fielding, the Most Valuable Players of this year's IPL have been:

		Team	Batting Points	Bowling Points	Fielding Points	Total Points
1.	Adam Gilchrist	Deccan	646.51	0.00	270	916.51
2.	Matthew Hayden	Chennai	722.73	0.00	75	797.73
3.	Suresh Raina	Chennai	524.42	149.18	105	778.60
4.	AB de Villiers	Delhi	567.24	0.00	195	762.24
5.	Rohit Sharma	Deccan	386.31	253.17	75	714.48
6.	Dinesh Karthik	Delhi	384.68	0.00	255	639.68
7.	Irfan Pathan	Punjab	229.78	328.57	60	618.34
8.	RP Singh	Deccan	11.30	480.53	105	596.83
9.	T Dilshan	Delhi	470.92	46.91	60	577.84
10.	Jacques Kallis	Bangalore	355.26	136.53	75	566.79
11.	Brad Hodge	Kolkata	398.82	135.04	30	563.86
12.	Anil Kumble	Bangalore	54.88	456.26	45	556.14
13.	Herschelle Gibbs	Deccan	385.43	0.00	165	550.43
14.	Yuvraj Singh	Punjab	357.01	117.02	75	549.03
15.	JP Duminy	Mumbai	394.58	92.88	60	547.46

A word about Matthew Hayden and AB de Villiers: The men have been in such awesome form that they have outperformed people who have brought bowling, batting and fielding skills to the table. They were, without a doubt the batsmen of the tournament, and had Delhi performed better in the semi-finals, AB could well have given Hayden a run for his money. No less impressive are RP Singh and Anil Kumble who have made it to the table largely due to their bowling efforts. Everyone else is an all-rounder of sorts with Gilchrist and Dinesh Karthik being the wicket-keeper batsmen, except for Herschelle Gibbs who also makes it to the top 15 due to his batting.

Adam Gilchrist has been the star Aussie though. In much the same way as last year, a retired, legendary, all-time great Australian cricketer, led a bunch of initial no-hopers to IPL glory. People will remember Gilchrist's innings in the semi-finals when they talk about IPL 2.0, but do not forget that he ended the tournament as the second highest run-scorer - and that after scoring a duck in the finals. In some way, it was fitting that he fell to Anil Kumble, seeing whom perform would have given immense joy to many an Indian fan.

Appropriately enough, the winner of the Man-of-the-series is also the Most Valuable player by a quantitative analysis - which might go some way towards demolishing Navjot Sidhu's oft-quoted dictum about statistics, viz. "Statistics are like bikinis - they reveal a lot, but not the most essential parts!"

Disclaimer: Yes, I know - I've put that pic up, just to get more hits on the site :-)