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The 2016 IPL got over on May 31. 1,426 sixes were hit, which is a new record. And once again this series led to some animated discussions on the role of bowlers in a game that is increasingly looking like baseball. Overall, everyone is feeling sorry for the bowlers when even a 15-year-old Vaibhav Suryavanshi can hit 65 sixes in 14 matches. In contrast, the great Virat Kohli hit only 25.
But are the bowlers really badly off? If you look at the effort to reward-ratio in T20 games, the answer has to be a big no. Given below are the reasons why.
Start with the bidding. The base price was Rs 30 lakh (about US$31,500) and many bowlers fetched only this much. Matheesha Pathirana was bought by KKR for Rs 18 crore (about US$1.9 million).
And what did they have to do to earn this money? Bowl just four overs per match. The winning team, RCB and the runner up, GG, played 18 each. Most of the rest played 14 and four played 16.
So, a RCB player who played in all matches, bowled the maximum allowed 18X4=72 overs. That’s because a bowler can bowl only four overs in a match.
RCB’s highest paid bowler was Josh Hazelwood who earned Rs 12 crore (about US$1.26 million). If you divide Rs 12 crore by 72 you get around Rs 16 lakh per over (about US$16,800). That’s a lot of money. And if a bowler bowls less, the per over earning increase, that is, the reward for effort is greater.
This is not all. There is no real expectation in a T20 game that a bowler will take wickets. If he does, and many do, it is a bonus. All a bowler has to do is to keep the runs conceded to about 5 runs per over. That’s one dot ball and five singles for a really successful bowler.
So, if you are a really clever bowler, acquired by the team for say Rs 6 crore (about US$630,000), and if you bowl the full quota of 64 or 72 overs, you can maximize your effort-reward ratio by bowling a stump-to-stump line and a cunning length to keep the runs conceded per over below 7. In other words, consistency is all you need. That’s how a player like Ravi Jadeja approaches the game.
The problem with this is that if even half the bowlers do this successfully, it turns into a low scoring game. The spectators and TV audiences don’t like those. So, there’s been an effort by the organizers to level the field by preparing flat wickets on which, as we have seen, even good length and accurate balls can be hit for boundaries.
But that aside, consider the effort-reward ratio of batsmen who get paid far more than bowlers but also have to entertain the crowd by scoring at the rate of at least two runs per ball. They have just a fraction of a second to play their shots and have a very small margin for error because they have to deal with 11 opponents and can be out if their judgement is off by as little as an inch, sometimes even a millimeter.
There is also the fear factor. The fact is that a very hard object weighing five and a half ounces coming at you at about 125-145 kilometers an hour. Only those who have been hit know what it’s like. High expectations. Hair breath error margins. Fear of injury. No, a batter’s effort-reward ratio doesn’t compare well with a bowler. In fact, it looks bad for batters.
Now you can decide who the smart cricketers are, batters or bowlers.
