IPL: Analyzing which wickets have the most fruitful partnerships (short data musings)

I’ve missed most of this year’s IPL tournament. I had meant to blog my analysis as the tournament was progressing, but I guess life came in the way. I just got hold of this year’s IPL match data from cricsheet.org, and ever since I have been itching to analyze it. Here is a short post about partnerships and a quick result summary. As usual, I used R and ggplot to work through the data, the most difficult part being extracting information from the YAML data format which the website provided the data in. (That’s a subject for an upcoming blog post).

So, here is the final result of my analysis around IPL partnerships:

IPL Partnerships: 2008–2020

A good look at this, reveals a good deal of information:

1. There is expectedly a marked decline from the 5th wicket onwards of the value of each partnership as indicated by the drastic change in the color. You would want to send the best of your talent in the first five.
2. Arguably (my eyesight may be deceiving me), though the partnership scores in the 2nd innings is overall lesser than the 1st innings, the 6th and the 7th wicket partnerships seem to be working better in the 2nd innings.
3. 2016 was an outlier year for the 2nd wicket partnership. This was because out of a total of 119 innings, there were 11 century partnerships which also included a massive double-century partnership of 229 runs between AB de Villiers and Virat Kohli.
4. 2020 was a fairly standard year with the opening partnership being the most successful one.

More analyses to come…