Shane Watson is a terrific all rounder – probably one of the best in Cricket. He was also the man of the series of the first season of IPL in 2008, playing for the Rajasthan Royals.
But was he really the most valuable player on the Rajasthan Royals team that year? When we completed the calculation of Win Probability Added (WPA) for all the players in IPL 2008, Watson’s total WPA score came out to be -0.161, which means that his total contribution in the tournament was actually below average, as per the WPA scores. Instead, his teammates Shane Warne, Sohail Tanvir and Yusuf Pathan round up the top three out of five best performances in terms of WPA in the tournament.
Watson’s batting WPA is 0.700, which is good for 13th overall among all batsmen. To be sure, he performed very well with the bat. He scored a total of 472 runs at an average of 47.20 and a strike rate 151.76, all of them excellent figures for a batsman in the T20 format. He, however, did have his share of lackluster performances with the ball, resulting in a -0.861 WPA. His teammates, Warne, Tanvir, Pathan and Munaf Patel performed much better with the ball. Tanvir picked up 1.597 bowling WPA, tops among all the bowlers.
The above analysis is not a knock on Watson’s performance in the first season of IPL 2008. His performance was admirable, but in the end it was a team effort from Rajasthan Royals that gave them the IPL crown in the first season. Elementary, my dear Watson, right?