It is inspiring to see a number of new faces enter the Indian domestic circuit, and a bunch of those accomplished players make it to the Indian team in the various formats of cricket. This majorly happens through scouting, where coaches and analysts around the country track these specific multifaceted talents and then work towards introducing them to the bigger stage. This is also the significant role of IPL teams and all other minor leagues across the country. Thousands of young players play in the Syed Mushtaq Ali Trophy, India’s most popular domestic T20 league.
With these in mind, we will be analyzing the best bowlers in this tournament in the past 2 seasons across the three phases of play. Based on the Weighted Aggregates Sum Product Assessment (WASPAS) method, we will take into account multiple important indicators that play a role in analyzing a bowler, and we will then provide weights based on the importance of each indicator. We will be taking the top 10 bowlers from every phase of play. The four indicators that we have considered are Strike Rate, Economy Rate, Balls per boundary, and Balls per dot.
Powerplay Bowlers
- Colour Indicates Score Range
Amit Yadav stands out as the best bowler in the powerplay with a perfect score of 1. He has bowled 73 deliveries in the powerplay and has a mind-boggling economy rate of 2.22 and he has picked up 7 wickets. An even more stunning stat is that he has conceded only 2 boundaries in the entirety of his spell. It is pretty surprising to see him not being picked by any team in the IPL, considering the dearth in the number of Indian right-arm off-spinners. A very interesting insight from this chart is a huge variation in the weighted score between the first and the second bowler, which portrays Amit Yadav as a powerplay specialist.
Another interesting name in this list is that of Abhijeet Saket, who has the most number of wickets among all the bowlers in this list (11 Wickets) but due to his slightly high economy rate of 6.8, he is at the bottom of the list. But nevertheless, he has stood out as a reliable powerplay bowler with an impressive strike rate of 13.27. An interesting stat among these bowlers is that the average economy among all these bowlers is a meagre 5.08, which tells us about the good number of reliable power play bowlers we have in the domestic circuit.
Middle Overs Bowlers
- Colour Indicates Score Range
The young leg spinner Amit Ali stands out as the best bowler. In his debut season, he picked up 11 wickets in 5 matches, 10 out of which came in the middle overs at an astonishing economy of 4.47. Closely following him are two other talented Ninad Rathva who is a left-arm off-spinner and the experienced Akshay Karnewar who is a right-arm off-spinner, both of whom have 8 and 14 scalps respectively. Another very interesting insight from this chart is that out of these 10 bowlers, 9 of them are spinners with Amit Ali being the only leg spinner. The only pacer in this list is Chintan Gaja who has been very impressive for Gujarat by picking up 9 scalps at an excellent strike rate of 12 and an economy rate of 5.83.
Death Overs Bowlers
- Colour Indicates Score Range
Darshan Nalkande from Vidharba has stood out as the best death overs bowler in the tournament. He has picked up 10 wickets at a stunning strike rate of 4.8 and an equally impressive economy rate of 5.87. He also showed promise when he played a few matches for the Gujarat Titans in the IPL. Yash Thakur from Vidarbha has closely followed his partner, picking up 14 scalps with a brilliant economy rate of 5.62 and what’s more impressive is that he has conceded a boundary every 14 deliveries, which speaks a lot about his accuracy. He has also appeared in the powerplay list where he picked up 7 wickets at an economy of 6.18. He is one of the best talents to not be present among the IPL teams.
Conclusion
Sometimes, it is very interesting to look away from the high intense international matches and leagues and focus more on these domestic leagues which provide a more understanding on how the process of scouting can be improved and how to focus on more specific talents that cater to the needs of the international teams and this is the biggest need of the hour in sports.
