There’s conventional cricketing wisdom that says there’s three types of T20 batters, the anchors, the sluggers, and, the builders. There’s two ways to score 12 runs off an over, two sixes and four dots or six twos.
You’d attribute players like Tim David, Andre Russell and Sunil Narine as more likely to do the former and players like Gill, Kohli and du Plessis are more likely to do the latter.
Using Spoda we managed to deconstruct how the top ten batters this season fared. Any shot that’s played with the intent of scoring runs, falls under an attacking shot option whereas any shot that looks to avoid runs is a defensive shot option.
Travis Head, Sunil Narine and Abhishek Sharma were the most successful in scoring runs off these shots, all striking at over 200, some players managed to have a high attacking shot percentage, but they failed to score boundaries off their attempts.
Head stands out in the chart, nearing 90 with his attacking shot percentage, he’s going to attack 9 out of the 10 balls you bowl at him. Eight players had over 80% attacking shots, and there were two standouts in Parag and Gaikwad, who fell below the threshold.
Gaikwad was often criticized for a relatively low strike rate, and it’s his intent at playing attacking/defensive shots that catches your eye, a low attacking shot % and a lower overall strike rate for the season.
There’s two ways to go about a defensive shot, you look to drop it into a gap and steal a quick run, or you just block it right back to the bowler. Looking at the data available, Pooran, Samson, Kohli and Narine were always looking to score, whereas Rahul, Abhishek, Sudarshan and Parag were content with it being a dot ball!
The intent of a batter, alongside the types of shot he uses remain to be an integral part of our game! Here you can see, Gaikwad chooses to be defensive a lot more compared to the rest, nearing a defensive shot rate of 30% there.
A similar technique could be used to analyze players before an auction, where you get to learn the upsides and the downsides of a player, looking at the data we have someone like Gaikwad is prone to avoid attacking shot because of how often they dismiss him.
Whereas, Abhishek Sharma simply would keep on pushing further and further, there are a few batters floating around who do not play the attacking shot as much as they could, with a high balls per dismissal rate when using them. These are the batters the IPL Franchises could keep a keen eye out for!
The data used in this article was all sourced from Spoda, an AI assistant aimed to solve cricketing queries and make analyzing the sport we love significantly easier.
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