Jasprit Bumrah was strangely discolored in the first game of the season – against the Chennai Super Kings, he leaked 43 from four overs and was the most expensive bowler of the game. However, unsurprisingly, it didn’t take him long to find his mojo. Against the Kolkata Knight Riders, he was back in his prime, and smart stats from ESPNcricinfo reveal he was fine.
According to Smart’s numbers, Bumrah’s 2 of 32 was the most shocking performance of the match. It hit him 113.5 hit points, slightly ahead of Rohit Sharma’s 111.1. Rohit won the Man-of-the-Match award, but Smart Stats gave the award to Bumrah. This is because the algorithm looks at not just the raw numbers, but the context in which the performances occurred.
There were four bowlers who threw their full quota of overs at a better economy rate: Sunil Narine, Trent Boult, James Pattinson, and Rahul Chahar, and three of them took two wickets as well, so why are the numbers hitting? Bumrah are that high? This is why.
Of the 24 balls he threw, 15 went to Andre Russell, Sunil Narine, Eoin Morgan and Dinesh Karthik, four of the most dangerous hitters on the Knight Riders. In those 15 balls, Bumrah conceded just three runs, which is incredibly low considering the quality of the batters he was pitching to. Smart Stats takes into account, among other things, the quality of the batter a bowler pitches at and calculates the pressure on the batter and the bowler for each one-inning ball. These 15 balls should have brought many more runs for the Knight Riders, but Bumrah’s skill kept the runs to three, earning him high-impact points.
In his last over he went for 27, but those races didn’t matter much, because by then the result was already decided. Given that the match was already a closed deal for the Mumbai Indians, the 27 races at the time didn’t affect Bumrah’s overall impact much. According to the algorithm, the smart races he awarded were 24.8; the fact that it was significantly lower than the 32 runs he conceded indicates that he did extremely well when the pressure was higher.
Sharma’s 80 of 54 was also a huge effort – his Smart Runs count was 89.5, meaning his innings were actually worth more than the runs he scored, considering the context. The third place in the overall impact ranking went to Shivam Mavi, who returned identical figures to Bumrah, 2 of 32. Mavi’s two wickets were those of the best hitters, Quinton de Kock and Sharma, and de Kock was fired very early, so Mavi’s Smart Wicket count, which measures the true value of a wicket, was 2.91. Bumrah also brought out two of the best hitters, but his real value in the game was the way he drowned out runs when the pressure was high. That’s why he was the Smart Stats Player of the Match.
.
