The IPL format – is there a change needed? Article by Gautam Thakar

So Deccan have won a thoroughly close contest – and in general a tournament that was edge of seat for most of the last few weeks. (of course there will be the usual match fixing claims doing the rounds)

I already said in my last post that we shouldn’t be too surprised that last years bottom of the table team is this years winner. They did have the player of the tournament, the purple cap winner, the under 23 player of the tournament and X factor winners in Symonds and Gibbs.

In fact in an ironic twist the Deccan chargers today displayed total team work with everyone trying to do their bit whereas the Bangalore Royal challengers tried to go for the X factor individualism (Van de Merwe, Dravid, Taylor all attempting to close it out when just staying around would have seen them home). But there’ll be a million what if’s - i wanted to ask a different question.

Does the IPL format need a change – does the best team really win? Take a look at the pre semi – final points table.

As you can see – even if you adjust it for the semi – finals ; Deccan Chargers would end with 18 points. Two points shy of Delhi with an extra game and a worse net run rate. And their IPL lscoreccard against Delhi would be 2-1 to Delhi. (Actually 2-0 for Delhi vs Deccan and 0-1 for Delhi vs Adam Gilchrist). Doesn’t sound totally fair. You’d argue that this is true for all major competitions including cricket itself. Yes , that’s right however those games aren’t as elaborate – ie 8 teams playing 14 games each. It’s one thing to have groups with fewer games and a knock out and quite another to play so many games and then hinge on one bad day.

The English Premier league which by the way has 20 teams and each play 38 games DOES NOT have a semi-final and final. The team with the highest points wins. Well, the downside of that is less excitement and perhaps interest if one team is too strong but still a fairer result.

How about an alternative option?

Each IPL team plays each other just once (so 7 games instead of 14). I don’t think the home and away argument holds – after all we played a whole tournament very far away from home :-) The top 4 teams are then in a “semi-final league” where they play each other once (or twice even if needed). Then the top two from this play a best of 3 final.

Practically speaking as well – as the number of franchises increase it will be hard to have the teams play each other twice; unless of course T-20 becomes the only form of cricket!!!

I do think this will maximize the chances of the best team winning while keeping the total number of games played in the same range.

What think?