The seventh season of IPL finally moves from the Arabian desert back to India. This is the right time to look back at the first leg of the tournament, and take a stock of how our model of evaluating players and team strengths have performed so far.
Currently, each team has played a total of 5 matches, out of the total of 14 they are supposed to play in the league stage. So we aren’t even one-third into the tournament yet, but the recent form of the teams is a good indication of how they are going to perform in the future. Before the tournament had started, we had posted the pre-tournament ranking of the teams. This was based on the total score of the top 11 players in each team, calculated using the data from the previous season of IPL and the Champions League T20 played last year. Let us look at the current rank of the teams, based on the same model but using the data of the ongoing season only.
| Current Rank | Team | Total score | Pre-tournament rank |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Kings XI Punjab | 1.380 | 7 |
| 2 | Chennai Super Kings | 1.185 | 2 |
| 3 | Sunrisers Hyderabad | 1.140 | 1 |
| 4 | Rajasthan Royals | 1.058 | 3 |
| 5 | Kolkata Knight Riders | 0.947 | 5 |
| 6 | Royal Challengers Bangalore | 0.883 | 6 |
| 7 | Mumbai Indians | 0.789 | 4 |
| 8 | Delhi Daredevils | 0.716 | 8 |
The team rank based on our model is, of course, not the same as the current standing of the teams in the points table based on win/loss record and net run rate. However, it is still an interesting exercise to compare the team rank obtained using the latest data, as compared to what we had obtained before the start of the tournament. The biggest difference, as you can see, is that Kings XI Punjab are currently the top team in the tournament, while Mumbai Indians have slipped down to the near bottom.
Before the start of the tournament, Mike Hussey was the top ranked player in our model, while Glenn Maxwell was ranked at 164. The change in fortune of their respective teams – Mumbai Indians and Kings XI Punjab – can be attributed to a large extent to these two players.
As for the match predictions: You can check out the latest match predictions on the IPL homepage. We have so far correctly predicted the outcome of 11 matches out of 20. Initially, our predictions were inaccurate, but once we had sufficient data from the current season, we switched over to using only this season’s data instead of relying to last year’s data. Since making that switch-over, we have got predictions right in 6 out of the last 7 matches. This includes the tied match between Kolkata Knight Riders and Rajasthan Royals, for which we had written in its preview:
If there was ever a chance of having a tie in a match in the tournament, then this one it is.
That prediction certainly turned out to be quite prophetic! We will be generating predictions for the remaining matches in the tournament as well, and hopefully they will continue to be as accurate, so stay tuned on Cricmetric for the rest of IPL.