Estelle Vasudevan
Sunil Narine wreaking havoc in the IPL is nothing new. A legend for KKR over the last 12 seasons, he’s had a few big IPLs and has been one of the greatest overseas players in the league’s history.
Over a career spanning 150+ IPL games, he’s managed to consistently be one of the best bowlers of the competition – which is quite a feat, especially when you consider that he is termed a ‘mystery’ spinner. A combination of remodeling his action after being called for chucking, being sidelined from the West Indies setup and just generally being at the age where many players are hanging up their boots, meant that people weren’t expecting too much from Narine, come 2024. You’d be hard-pressed to find even a huge KKR fan who genuinely thought Narine was going to have an MVP season. And you can forget about the casual viewer.
He hasn’t just had a brilliant season, he’s had a brilliant season with both ball AND bat.
Sunil Narine is no batter… or is he? Well, it’s complicated. For so long he was so good with the ball that no one really paid much attention to his batting. He made 9, 21, 10, 0 and 7 runs in his first five seasons… That’s across each season.
But then KKR decided they’d bump him up to the top of the order in 2017. He’d made 47 runs in the five seasons preceding this promotion. Their analyst, AR Srikkanth, had seen glimpses of what Narine could do with the bat in the BBL and PSL immediately preceding that IPL season. He’d also seen a lot of ‘best batsman’ trophies in Narine’s Trinidad home, and learned that the player was a “legend in windball cricket batting”. The call was spot on, and Narine made a lot of quick runs at the top of the order across a couple of seasons from 2017 to 2019.
A useful little feather to his hat, but no one was picking him solely for what he could do with the bat. Across 13 seasons, Narine averages 17 with a strike rate of 166. Not terrible, you say? Consider what his 2024 numbers have done to those figures – he averages 38.42 at 182.94 after 12 games this season – he’s more than doubled his average and scored 10% faster. You could say, he wasn’t really given the opportunity to bat that much early in his IPL career. That’s fair, but he’s scored nearly a hundred runs more in 2024 than his best season with the bat (2018), in fewer games.
His True average is 2.32 this season, but the real kicker is that his True strike rate is 33.95. Which essentially means he’s averaging 2.32 points higher than is expected for a batter with the same over distribution, and his striking 33.95 points quicker as well.
True average and strike rates for batters with over 150 runs in IPL 2024
Only Phil Salt, Travis Head and Jake Fraser-McGurk are scoring quicker than him, at a better average (of players with over 150 runs). In comparison, Narine made a total of 21 runs at an average of 3 last season – you don’t need sophisticated numbers to tell you that’s not good. This time, he’s had a great season and that’s before we even get to his bowling.
Narine isn’t the striking force he was in his early years with the ball – his strike rate was below 18.5 in his first three seasons for KKR, but has been steadily on the rise since then. However, what he has continued to be is an extremely miserly operator. He’s never gone at above 8 runs an over across a season in his IPL career – his worst, 7.98 in 2023 is still pretty good in the grand scheme of things. This season, he’s got a strike rate of 18.80 and an economy of 6.64 (True Econ of 2.35). He sits in 13th position on the most wickets table, but no other bowler (except Jasprit Bumrah) has taken more wickets at a better economy and only Bumrah and Khaleel Ahmed have bowled more dot balls than him (111 in 47 overs).
Within the space of a month and half, people have gone from forgetting he still plays to calling for him to be back in the maroon for West Indies in a home World Cup. Narine has since closed the door on a comeback, but imagine how big of an impact he’s had – he hasn’t played for West Indies since 2019 and now if HE wanted to, he’d be playing another World Cup!
The thing with Narine is, his batting doesn’t really pass the ‘eye test’, as the kids say. He doesn’t really look like, or bat like, a batter. And this is reflected in his control percentages and false shots per wicket numbers. His control versus pace is at 54.74% and it’s 54.29% against spin – that is the lowest amongst batters with more than 200 runs this season by some distance. And yet, he’s been one of the most successful openers, making 461 runs in 12 games.
Sunil Narine’s control percentage over the last three seasons
If that’s caught your attention, then consider this, Narine actually had a higher percentage of control against both spin and pace last season. You know how many runs he made last season? 21, in case you forgot. Sometimes in cricket, no matter what numbers are put in front of you, there are things that just don’t make sense and Sunil Narine making runs is one of them.
