Where was the Intent?
A look at boundary-hitting in the UAE leg of the 2021 IPL
Yesterday, I sat through roughly two hours of Delhi Capitals nurdling their way to 135-5 in their 20 overs in the IPL Qualifier Two, to be eliminated by Kolkata Knight Riders. This was at Sharjah, a venue which has traditionally been renowned for being extremely high scoring (it has a 55 metre straight boundary from one end) but this year, has been much lower scoring, due to some very slow tracks.
Despite the late heroics from the Delhi bowlers, this 135 was never likely to be enough - and nor should it have been. First of all, a score of 135-5 should never, ever be witnessed in T20 cricket - it is a scoreline which clearly indicates that a team’s batting resources were not maximised. Not only this, but a team total of 12 boundaries (10% of balls faced) was a pitiful effort which deserved elimination. Due to potential match-losing innings from Shikhar Dhawan (36 from 39 balls) and Marcus Stoinis (18 from 23), a situation evolved whereby number five Rishabh Pant came into bat with just 35 balls left of the team’s innings, and number six Shimron Hetmyer came into bat with just 28 balls remaining. A team voluntarily engineering a situation where their two most aggressive batters face less than a quarter of the available balls in the entire innings is, quite simply, a major strategic error, and Delhi were punished for this with their elimination.
Delhi will perhaps argue that, following losing the toss and having been inserted by KKR captain Eoin Morgan, they didn’t know what a winning score was likely to be batting first at Sharjah, but that's where their analysts have to earn their money. T20 cricket is a game where there are many knowns but also plenty of unknowns, but one thing we could ascertain in advance was the average score/run rate of chasing teams at Sharjah in this year’s UAE leg - and this is where we start talking about a more broader concept as well, that the ‘average score’ at a venue isn’t a ‘par’ score.
Lazy, uninformed commentators, and indeed, teams, suggest that the average score at a venue is a par score, but there are several clear issues with this. Firstly, the obvious one - what time scale do you use? You can’t use all time data given that the scoring rate of T20s rose rapidly from 2016 onwards. In this particular case, given Sharjah’s dramatic change in conditions, I’d be looking at this leg of the IPL only. Secondly, and equally as importantly, an average score can only be a par score if 50% of teams batting first win, and that’s been far from the case in this UAE leg of the IPL at Sharjah.
What we did know in advance, and Delhi should have also known in advance as well, is that only two occasions in the nine matches played at Sharjah before yesterday’s match in this UAE leg of the IPL were won by the team batting first. One of these was possibly one of the worst chases I’ve ever seen constructed by a team, when Sunrisers Hyderabad lost by five runs to Punjab Kings who posted 125-7 batting first.
Considering this, you could say history was against Delhi, or you could also suggest that this match represented an opportunity to turn history against itself. Delhi had already made a poor job of batting first at Sharjah, limping to 127-9 against KKR in the group stages with all three players facing 20+ balls not recording a strike rate of over 120, so they should have known in advance what NOT to do.
In advance of yesterday’s match, teams batting second at Sharjah scored at a rate of 120.59 per 100 balls (including extras) in this year’s UAE leg of the IPL, but that also featured a shambolic 85 all out from Rajasthan Royals. Taking that out of the equation, the rate rose to 124.30 per 100 balls, and mapping that over 120 balls looks like a ballpark target score of 150.
We can also look at the boundary percentage needed to achieve this. This is critical because as I’ve written about numerous times before, around 85% of teams who win the boundary percentage count win the match in T20 cricket. Taking the RR shambles out of the equation again, chasing teams at Sharjah before yesterday in this year’s IPL scored at 14.30% boundaries, which is very low indeed - a not insurmountable figure by a long way (it’s around 2% below the general IPL mean figure). The historical split in a 120 ball innings would be around 10.5 fours and 6.5 sixes. Teams batting first at Sharjah have really struggled for boundary hitting, doing so just 11.88% of the time before yesterday’s Qualifier 2, but subsequent teams should know that they’d need this extra level of intent to get up to around 14.5% boundaries to have much of a chance of posting a winning total batting first.
So, with a quick look at data we can get some ballpark guides of the following:-
1) A target score batting first
2) The boundaries required to achieve this.
3) The number of non-boundary runs needed to achieve this.
This stuff isn’t particularly difficult. But, if a team is targeting 150+ batting first, they should never be 135-5 because it evidently shows a huge lack of intent, so I want to move on to talk about intent in general and the effect of it in this year’s IPL.
I’ve watched pretty much all the IPL matches this year, and many of them have been rather a tough watch, for various reasons. There’s been plenty of inept tactics, strange pieces of recruitment but worst of all has been the lack of intent from batters. I always find it strange when teams or players post low scores or score slowly - almost always the pitch gets blamed, as opposed to a lack of intent.
I should point out here that I quantify intent as basically boundary-hitting, so therefore boundary percentage, which is the outcome when you combine an attacking mindset with strong execution of shots. You might quibble and say that a player like Virat Kohli, who is the master of turning ones into twos, shows intent in that area, but the number of twos scored by a team is far more inconsequential than the number of boundaries scored. In my view, Delhi lacked intent in their innings yesterday, and despite their relative success in the competition, it was something of a self-fulfilling prophecy - they have the lowest six percentage of all teams in the competition so far:-
Not only this, but they had the second-lowest six percentage in the UAE leg as well, with only Sunrisers Hyderabad - a batting group so poor that an overhaul is inevitable at the major auction - below them:-
This stuff doesn’t happen by accident. It’s 100% related to a team’s recruitment. If you recruit strong six-hitters, you’ll get strong six-hitting output. If you recruit mediocre six-hitters, you’ll get mediocre six-hitting output. Again, this stuff is not difficult. As an example, it’s worth remembering that Delhi voluntarily purchased Steve Smith at auction, as opposed to the likes of Alex Hales - if you buy players with poor six-hitting numbers, don’t expect them to turn into the second version of Andre Russell. It just won’t happen.
If you’re hitting around 2-3% less sixes than other teams, then you’ll have to find other ways to make up the runs. You’ll need to hit 3-4% more fours, or be the most incredible rotating team that was ever known, or have an unbelievable bowling attack. This is why I have said on numerous occasions on The Cricket Podcast that while I believe Delhi to be a decent team, their position on top of the league for part of the group stages was false - in my view they weren’t nearly the best team in this year’s tournament.
As mentioned earlier, a lack of intent is never really mentioned by commentators for a team/player struggling when batting. However, I have the complete opposite view - low scores usually occur because players are playing a risk averse style, looking to minimise the number of dots they play, as opposed to the more mathematically sound approach of hitting boundaries.
28 batters in the UAE leg of the IPL - where pitches are supposed to have been pretty bad, if you believe the commentators - faced 100+ balls, and 12 of these players hit over 16% boundaries. Here’s a breakdown of their numbers:-
Looking at this, you can see that it was extremely possible to show high levels of intent in the UAE leg of this year’s IPL. Yahashvi Jaiswal, Suryakumar Yadav and Prithvi Shaw all hit over 20% boundaries, while Shimron Hetmyer, Mayank Agarwal and Rahul Tripathi weren’t far off either.
23 of these players faced 100+ balls in both the UAE leg of IPL 2021, and the IPL between the start of 2019 and the end of the first half of this year’s IPL. Here are their boundary percentages across both instances:-
This is interesting because it pretty much shows that if you were an intent machine before the UAE leg, you were after it - with the exception of Moeen Ali, and what looks to be a declining Wriddhiman Saha. But players like Prithvi Shaw, Suryakumar Yadav, Mayank Agarwal, and Shimron Hetmyer were able to maintain their intent levels, while the likes of Rohit Sharma, Faf du Plessis and KL Rahul were also able to broadly keep their boundary percentage similar despite perceived worse conditions in the UAE.
Of these 23 players, 14 had a lower boundary percentage in the IPL 2021 played in the UAE than from 2019-end of the first half of this year’s tournament. The median figure was -0.48% boundaries lost in the UAE compared to the other sample running from the 2019-end of first half this year’s tournament, a rather inconsequential figure.
My point is this:-
If teams scored low in the UAE, or players batted slowly, the vast majority of the time it was because they were set up to do so (teams) or didn’t have a regular high strike rate innings in their locker (players). Either way, this is down to a lack of intent, and poor recruitment. When you have teams playing 7+ Crore for far-below average boundary-hitters, and teams playing an aged style of batting where they look to preserve wickets for 16 overs and then have a hit, then don’t be surprised if they score low, or slowly - they lack intent. If they signed ‘intent merchants’, to use a phrase which is becoming more frequently used, then they wouldn’t have this problem. These intent merchants were available in the auction, but teams thought that mediocre boundary-hitters were better options.
If that doesn’t give you insight into the value which IPL teams leave on the table, and how a coherently data-driven team could obtain huge value in an inefficient market, I’m not sure what will.