Pringle: IPL have realised it’s bowlers that win games
Derek Pringle analyses the reasons behind the big-spending at last week’s IPL auction on bowlers and all-rounders
For those who think the Indian Premier League is cricket’s La-La land, the latest auction would have done little to disabuse them. Eye-watering prices for players of promise rather than pedigree were what caught the eye, most notably the £1.4 million for Tymal Mills, a Sussex bowler who has played just four T20 internationals.
Even more (£1.7m) was lavished on Ben Stokes though for me that is understandable. Stokes may just be starting to get the measure of white ball cricket but as an all-rounder who can field like a demon, he will always be in the game. It is also plain that he has been touched by the cricketing gods in special ways, albeit with the Faustian trade-off between his skills and a self-destruct button that has been partially depressed on more than one occasion.
If there was any method to the madness of the latest spending spree by franchise owners, it was that they were prepared to pay big for pace bowlers and pace-bowling allrounders, the types of players India does not readily produce in great numbers.
As a result, decent wedge was shelled out for New Zealand’s Trent Boult, Australia’s Pat Cummins, South Africa’s Kagiso Rabada and England’s Chris Woakes.
There is also a growing recognition that while many still consider T20 a batsman’s game, what with short boundaries, super-rebounding bats and proscriptive rules where bowlers are allowed to direct the ball, a special bowler can be a match-winner for you.
It has taken a while for the rupee to drop but coaches now realise that someone who regularly goes for fewer than six runs an over and who can take a few wickets to boot is much more valuable than a player who can heave it over the ropes.
Recently, it has been left-arm pace bowlers who were thought more effective, something to do with the angle they bowl from making slogging to leg more difficult and setting defensive fields more easy.
Mills and Boult both tick that box though it may be that Mills, who came to cricket late (in his mid-teens), has the added advantage of not thinking like a bowler schooled in traditional ways.
Randomness could well be the key to bowling in T20, especially at his pace, the old verity that if he doesn’t know where it is going, the batsman certainly won’t.
Although I’m sceptical about the severity of the back defect which allows Mills to send down four overs at full tilt in T20 without ill effect but would terminate his career if that workload was increased, he does possess the great gift of extreme pace from a fast shoulder and powerful torso.
He also appears to possess double jointed wrists, given the flexibility required for some of his slower balls, but then Jade Dernbach had everything he does (save for that last few mph), and has now all but faded from what should have been a stellar white ball career.
Not that I believe Mills will necessarily go the same way. Unlike Dernbach, Mills has a desire to learn and improve. He also, for the moment, lacks Dernbach’s narcissism, though big money does have a way of changing even the most sensible people.
Most curious, though, is what did Royal Challengers Bangalore (RCB) see in Mills that Essex, the county that discovered and nurtured him, did not – Essex allowing him to go to Sussex two seasons ago without even attempting to compete with the latter’s offer, thought to be around £70,000?
I reckon, as Alison Mitchell does writing on Pages 12-13 of this paper, that it came down to one man, Virat Kohli, RCB’s captain. After all, Mills appeared to have no great expectations of being well rewarded given his base price was set at £60,000.
Kohli has played IPL since 2008 and knows when he faces something different or special. And while he struck Mills for a mighty six over longoff in the recent T20 series against England, one of the more incredible shots not to have been issued from the bats of Vivian Richards or Adam Gilchrist, Mills discomfited him enough to make him one of this season’s must-have items in the IPL.
What puzzles, though, is the speculative nature of it all and the lack of logic or at least relativism. While we all know that a little something extra in life can come with a premium, the fact that Chris Jordan went for just £60,000 (Mills’ base price), and only then in the second round of bidding, seems bizarre.
From their auction prices, Jordan is rated as being 1/23rd the player Mills is and yet he is much more experienced than his Sussex team mate, can bat much better than him and is one of the best fielders and catchers in the modern game.
Despite that, Kohli and his coaches have decided that Jordan was either too safe or too predictable and have let him go to Sunrisers Hyderabad, backing their judgment over the stats that Mills is likely to win more games for them. We shall see.
There is, one suspects, an element of novelty to the bigger signings. Woakes has improved markedly as a bowler and yet he is not obviously superior in skills or pace, with ball or bat, to Jordan, England’s go-to bowler at the death in T20. Yet he commanded a sum almost ten times higher in this his first IPL despite not playing a T20 match for England since 2015.
The greatest irony of this big spending is that India, once a place pace bowlers tried to avoid due to the back-breaking placidity of the pitches, is now rewarding them like never before, at least in the pocket.
Whether that investment will translate into IPL glory remains to be seen. If it does, perhaps T20 is not the batsmen’s game it once seemed.
Someone who regularly goes for fewer than six runs an over and who can take a few wickets to boot is much more valuable than a player who can heave it over the ropes