IPL 2020: Best stat-padders XI of the tournament

11. Rahul Chahar

It’s a bit nit-picky to dissect the performance of the season’s defending champions negatively. But, for a few blemishes, as there were in MI’s stunning campaign, there is quite an interesting outlier that needs to be discussed.

Rahul Chahar, the 21-year-old leggie, was Mumbai’s go-to spinner for the major part of their campaign. The dextrous leg-spinner featured in all but one match for the Mumbai Indians, where he picked up 15 wickets @ 28.86 (ER of 8.16). With stats like those, it’s not hard to see why he got a prolonged run in the playing XI.

Interestingly, though, the one game he did miss out turned out to be MI’s all-important finale against the Delhi Capitals. And for good reason, too: in the pre-match interview, captain Rohit Sharma stated that Delhi’s batting-order was crowded with quite a few left-handers, which meant that they had to ‘tactically’ swap a wrist-spinner for a finger-spinner.

But through this match update, Rohit had subtly managed to mask Rahul’s ongoing issues against Southpaw-batters this year. While Rahul was able to bamboozle right-handers with his sharp away-movement, his opposing left-handers didn’t have a particularly tough time in negotiating his inwards-drifting bowling. Thanks to such polarizing stats, the young Mumbai leggie rounds off as the final player of this stat-padders XI.

~Written by Soham Bhowal