Kings XI bowling options in IPL 2020
How KXIP could use their resources effectively
KXIP, in the absence of Ravichandran Ashwin, have a relatively inexperienced spin attack this year. Their pace attack on the other hand, has some experience, but it is overseas heavy. Here, I take a look at their bowling resources and make some recommendations on how they could effectively deploy them. I don’t delve much into overall team composition, chemistry, form and translating non-T20 performances to the IPL in this piece. I also rely almost solely on historical data and refrain from making judgements based on potential, coach-ability, grooming, ROI and other longer term and business considerations.
I’ve used data from most games in the past 3 years of T20s and a methodology that I had developed in previous work here and here to weight evaluations based on evidence such that less evidence projects average outcomes with more and more evidence taking projections away from the average gradually.
Summary of recommendations By Bowler
Mujeeb ur Rahman: One of the stingiest bowling options in all of IPL. Can be bowled in the PP, but bowling in the Middle could be impactful as well given slimmer alternatives in the middle. Try not to leave for the death. There are better options there.
Especially good against Finch, Buttler, Samson. Has taken Pant often without being too expensive. Avoid against KD Karthik. Nabi also takes him for runs.
Mohammed Shami: Local experienced lead, handy under pressure. Good death option. Can be good in the power play, but needs to take more wickets and leave containment to the other end, especially when there is spin on the other end.
Good against Dhoni, KH Pandya. Avoid against ABD, Kohli. Very expensive against Russell. Can be useful to get Lynn, the Pandya brothers, Williamson & even Kohli, not so much Warner.
GC Viljoen: Good in the power play and the death, but not a great option in the middle. Not the first choice for the power play and death either. So, unfortunately, always a backup option. Disproportionately better against right handers.
Good against Stoinis. Stingy against Narine, Rohit Sharma, Dhawan, Pant, Finch, Carey, but these could have come when it mattered less.
SS Cottrell: Great wicket-taking option. Could use as one in the PP and is probably a better option than Shami in the PP based on this. Not a great death option. Has better numbers against left-handers, but this doesn’t show up in match impact.
Good against Pant & Narine. Not the best option against Rohit Sharma & Hetmyer. Has a good chance of getting Steve Smith’s wicket.
CJ Jordan: Good numbers, but beware of the match context for these. Data suggests that these may have come in less impactful situations. Performance is not as great in tough situations. Not a great wicket taking option in the death & against left handers, but he doesn’t leak a ton of runs.
Avoid against RG Sharma, M Marsh, Finch & Moeen Ali. Has a good chance of picking up CA Lynn & SE Rutherford.
M Ashwin: Interestingly, as a leggie, somewhat more successful against left handers. Overall, just about average. Has good economy numbers in the middle overs, but this hasn’t translated to match impact, meaning that these probably came in lower scoring games in general.
Good matchup for Q de Kock. Likely to pick up Rayudu, PA Patel, SA Yadav and Narine, but not overwhelmingly so.
Not sure if Ashwin would trump Bishnoi as a first choice.
K Gowtham: Economy & wicket rate is just at or below average, but these come at the right times and translate to good match impact. Worse against left handers even as an orthodox off spinner. Especially high impact in the middle overs.
Good against Watson, Uthappa & Lynn. Narine seems to take a lot of runs off him.
GJ Maxwell: Great spin option for the power play as well as the death. Can even open if KXIP want to open with spin and Mujeeb isn’t available or doesn’t fit in the team for balance.
Very useful since he does well against good players of spin like MM Ali. Also does well against SA Yadav and IP Kishan. Has a good chance of getting Eoin Morgan.
Jimmy Neesham: Super expensive, but can take wickets at the right times. This has made him especially effective in the middle overs. Probably good to use him in spurts as a partnership breaker.
Not a good option against Stokes. Has a good chance of picking up Russell & Bairstow.
H Brar: Very little signal to say anything meaningful from a data perspective.
Arshdeep Singh: Very little signal to say anything meaningful from a data perspective.
R Bishnoi: Did not have any data for. Personally, I am excited to see how he does though based on whatever I have seen of him.
Nalkande: Did not have any T20 data for. 100% coach’s call.
Ishan Porel: Did not have any T20 data for. 100% coach’s call. He has been coming off a strong domestic season though. So, it might not be a bad call to give him a shot.
Let’s first look at some aspects of KXIP’s bowling strategy at a high level.
A more spin focused approach
Whether it is data driven strategic decision making or an organic decline in the actual or perceived quality of their pace unit, KXIP, in the last 2–3 seasons, have moved to become a more spin focused unit, and with this, the performance of their pace unit has also declined from the perspective of runs conceded.
In the last two seasons, Kings XI Punjab (KXIP) have finally caught up with other teams in introducing more spin in the power play. They haven’t had too many seasons where their spinners strangled the opposition in the power play any more than the pacers until 2018 when they brought in young Mujeeb ur Rahman and played him in 11 of 14 games.
KXIP’s use of spin hasn’t just gone up in the power play, however. They have used more spin even in the middle overs. KXIP pacemen have conceded much more than spinners in the middle overs in the last three seasons.
The use of Mujeeb & Shami
Mujeeb and Shami are arguably the lead spin & pace bowlers respectively, at KXIP this year. So, let’s take a quick look at how they have been used.
In 2018, Mujeeb bowled 2.5x more deliveries outside the PP than he did in the PP. In 2019, KXIP changed coaches from Brad Hodge to Mike Hesson. Mujeeb played fewer games (5 down from 11), but bowled mostly in the power play. Under Hodge, he was still used as the main spin option in the power play when KXIP used spin in the PP, but overall, he was used a lot more in the middle overs. Mujeeb did 60% worse on RPO in 2019, than he did in the previous year.
Similarly, Shami was used by Hesson a little differently than he had earlier been used at Delhi — a little bit more as a death bowler.
From a run stemming perspective, Mujeeb has been one of the best bowlers in T20 cricket. The only bowler who is even close to as stingy as Mujeeb in the PP is Narine. But, if the goals is to take wickets, some of KXIP’s pace options are probably the better option. Notably, in the power play, Shami may not be one of these pace options, while in the death he can become one of your best options.
This, however, isn’t the full story. The value of an extra run (measured in impact on wins) conceded or an extra wicket taken isn’t uniform across situations and conditions. Factoring these in gives us an indication of the criticality of the time when a wicket was taken or a run saved.
Here, I have taken the relative WPA for each phase of the innings and looked at how far each bowler is from the average for all balls bowled in that phase. I’ve also gone with the usual evidence based weighting which puts bowlers like Suchith & Brar who haven’t bowled much closer to the average due to lack of evidence otherwise.
From what we have seen so far, Mujeeb in the power play going into the middle overs is a no-brainer, but Cottrell is probably the better contender to open the innings than Shami. They are great foils for each other with one’s impact largely coming from taking wickets and the other’s coming from strangling the opposition. KXIP would want to use up Cottrell’s overs by the death though.
Neesham & Maxwell’s numbers here are very interesting. Maxwell looks really good in the power play, but not so much in the middle overs. This is where Neesham has shone, despite conceding runs, because he has taken wickets at important times. One indication of this is the following — Neesham’s 15 wickets have come when the average score for the batsman was ~24. Overall, wickets in the middle overs come when the batsman is at an average score of ~20.
KXIP may even want to consider using Maxwell instead of Mujeeb to open if they are struggling with the overseas player limit. Maxwell’s batting provides that added edge that can overcome any remaining void left by Mujeeb’s absence if he can cover most of the lost ground in bowling.
Pace options for the middle overs
In the middle overs, assuming that Cottrell only has a couple of overs to bowl, none of the pace options are a clear pick. If Cottrell isn’t playing and Shami was used in the power play already, then one would want to keep the rest of Shami’s overs for the death.
The pace option in the middle is actually dependent on death strategy even when it comes to the other toss up — Jordan & Neesham. Jordan has the better RPO/WPO numbers but Neesham looks good in the middle in terms of impact. It may come down to form, their batting, how they use the pace bowler (Neesham probably works a bit better in multiple 1 over spells or as a partnership breaker) and who else they have to bowl in the death (Neesham doesn’t seem like a great option to have to bowl in the death; Jordan might be). The other option is to use Shami based on his impact, despite his RPO/WPO numbers. Then, Shami can continue into the death where he looks great. This means that Shami can’t bowl in the power play. So you have to pick Cottrell.
Unfortunately, Viljoen looks good in the power play and the death, but he has very tough competition there from Cottrell and Shami respectively. And, the middle overs are not Viljoen’s best by a margin. KXIP are a little imbalanced in this regard.
We don’t have data for them here, but Ishan Porel & Darshan Nalkande are the other options on hand. It might be good to try Porel based on his recent strong domestic run.
Spin, other than Mujeeb
When you have someone like Mujeeb in the ranks, it’s easy to declare victory with your spin department without due consideration. Let’s not do that here and look at the other options.
First, as we saw above, KXIP do have options even without Mujeeb. So, as long as they don’t believe they are completely reliant on Mujeeb, they aren’t.
We don’t have data for Bishnoi. He has definitely looked good in the U19 cricket that we have seen him in, but it is way too early to make a call on someone based on 6 list A games, using data alone.
Spin bowling for KXIP in general is relatively inexperienced, but J Suchith hasn’t done himself any disfavors in the little that he has bowled.
Between Murugan Ashwin & K Gowtham, who are the relatively more experienced ones, Ashwin has the better stats, but Gowtham has done really well to pull games back, especially in the middle overs. Then, there is also the consideration of one being a wrist spinner and the other being an orthodox finger spinner. On that note, let’s take a look at the numbers by batsman handedness.
Interestingly, Gowtham does a bit better against RHB than LHB compared to his peers. This is noteably unlike Maxwell, the other more classic off spinner at KXIP. Mujeeb is one too, but that is only because they have to chalk him into pre-existing taxonomy. One could look at this another way: Gowtham does much worse against left-handers than his peers. In fact, if we look at the normalized relative WPA which is an indication of the proportion of available leverage (win probability) grabbed in favor of the batting team, we find that Gowtham is the worst of the KXIP bowlers against left-handers. We also see that Maxwell actually does better against right-handers as well, when it comes to ground gained out of what was available in a given situation, but not nearly to the same extent.
Matchups
Let’s get a little bit more granular and look at how KXIP can use their bowlers against specific batsmen. Matchups are very popular and exciting because they look very actionable. However, from what I have seen, they are often overused without much rigor. A lot of matchups are based on very few deliveries (small sample size).
Here, I used the evidence weighting approach that we have been using to handle small sample sizes. I took a list of ~60 top order batsmen from the other IPL teams used all deliveries where either one of them was the striker or where one of the KXIP bowlers was the bowler. I then used this data to compute the difference in the estimate of the normalized relative WPO for each matchup from the average matchup. This is the indicator that tells us how much leverage was grabbed from what was available, by the batsman vs the bowler. I use this as the primary indicator of who does better in a matchup.
Here are the top batsmen with non-trivial signal of an imbalanced matchup in either direction. Note that a balanced matchup could result from it actually being balanced, but also from there being little evidence to suggest otherwise.
If we look at specific goals of taking wickets or of keeping a batsman quiet, irrespective of how it impacted the match result, we could adopt and similar approach and look at RPO & WPO relative to the average RPO/WPO in a given situation (EWR-RPO/WPO).
So, there you have it. I tried to get this out before the tournament started but I couldn’t make it happen. Today, in their first game of the season, KXIP dropped Mujeeb on a wicket that saw some movement early and was sticky. Shami picked up some early wickets with Cottrell as the containing job early on was pretty much done by the wicket. Maxwell wasn’t bowled unlike what I’d recommend based on what we saw here. Jordan didn’t work out too well, especially against Stoinis and we could’ve seen that coming. While Shami did well in the middle overs, Cottrell was bowled in the death and did not do well. Based on what we saw here, we would’ve swapped that around and expected a better result.
Having said that, these recommendations and approaches work only in the aggregate in the longer run and not on a per game basis. So, it would be foolish to claim that these recommendations would or would not work in a particular match. The goal of this piece is to provide guidance on what a good approach could be to improve KXIP’s chances of success. There are several holes and blindspots that can only be plugged by complementing this information with on-field expert assessments.
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