Ajinkya Rahane thinks some of you are jealous. That’s because you keep bringing up his recent strike rate and some of his struggles. And he’s thinking to himself, I don’t know, a couple of years ago I did really well.
Against SRH, he scored eight off ten balls. These things happen in the IPL and anyone can get stuck at any stage. And to be fair to him, a couple of days before that he did make 67 off 40. Again, the only issue was that even though the strike rate looks good, it was a little bit slow for that game.
I don’t think I’m one of those people that Rahane would think is jealous of him. In fact, of all the cricketers in the world, I can’t think of anyone who people have accused me of being paid for more than by him. When everyone was doubting him in Test cricket, I was still pointing out a lot of positives.
In T20 cricket, that’s harder to do.
For instance, in 2022, he had a strike rate of 103. It’s actually very hard to have a strike rate that low in T20 cricket. And then the next year, it was over 170. That’s also pretty hard to do in T20 cricket. It’s one of the worst seasons we’ve ever seen, followed by one of the best seasons we’ve ever seen.
And so you can understand why Ajinkya Rahane is sitting there going, guys, I get it. I wasn’t playing well for a while, and now I am. Why are you still getting on about it? That’s because he has made a change to his game. But it is almost entirely when he’s playing pace bowling.
In 2024, Rahane went at less than a run a ball against spin. Again, that is very hard to do, but that’s his limitation as a T20 batter. It’s why on occasion teams will try one, or even two spinners against him when he is opening the batting. Why let him face pace bowling? He really likes that. Chuck him as many spinners as possible.
And because of what Rahane was talking about and some other things I’ve been noticing, I thought it was worth looking at what players are really good against one thing and not very good against the other.
So first, we have to work out exactly how good Rahane is against pace and how bad he is against spin. You can see in the last couple of years, he’s been better than average against pace. That’s very good.
But he is a long way back against spin. In fact, of all the players we looked at, Rahane was the worst player against the turning ball in the IPL in the last couple of years.
Clearly, most players are going to be in the middle ground. But we were looking for outliers. And to be fair, Rahane is an incredible outlier when it comes to playing pace and spin.
But in order to work this out, we really had to come up with one metric that would help us. We talked to former Indian analyst Himanish Ganjoo and looked at his impact method, because this factors in both how many runs you make and how efficient you are at scoring them.
So you could go deeper for each player, but the outliers here really tell an interesting story.
***
For instance, our second outlier is Virat Kohli. He’s exceptional against pace. In fact, he’s one of the best players in the IPL against the faster ball. The problem is that he is a considerable negative against spin.
He’s now got the slog sweep, and so hopefully he will continue to work on that. But essentially what happens is that once the powerplay ends, he goes back into his shell a little bit and takes a lot of agreed upon singles. That really changes his impact quite dramatically.
If you’re just talking about the quicks, he’s not that far off the best player against fast bowling, which is Travis Head, his former RCB teammate.
The difference is the huge gap between the two of them when it comes to spin. Head wasn’t always a good player of spin, but he’s found a way to whack it and make it work for him. Over the last five or six years, and a lot of that was through early IPL exposure and being in the nets, he’s developed a method that works well enough.
Being that he is the best player against pace, he only needs to be marginally better against spin – and he’s nailing that.
Right near him is Suryakumar Yadav. You wouldn’t automatically compare him to Head, but he is absolutely brilliant against pace, and more than good enough against spin. I wouldn’t say he is a specialist against the quicker bowlers, but he is worth more than four runs per innings against them, while still being at two against spin.
So he is a really good player of spin, but he’s just better against the quicks.
This led me to look for the most even and dominant player against both, and that is Heinrich Klaasen. Purely on reputation, the South African is known for absolutely smashing spin everywhere. But he also smashes pace, absolutely everywhere. He’s remarkably even.
That makes sense because if you are from South Africa, you naturally face a lot of seam. We’ve talked before about his peculiar backstory about why he got very good player spin. Essentially, he would roll pitches for his friends, who were all spinners.