Suneer Chowdhary
( Cricket Writer)
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The Kings XI Punjab beat the Deccan Chargers rather convincingly yesterday, and that took them to an unprecedented nine wins out of their last 10 matches. What was interesting about their win was that it was not only set up by Shaun Marsh, who in turn went on to receive his 4th Man-of-the-Match award of the tournament, but also by a huge first wicket stand.

This has been the trend that has pretty much emerged from the Kings XI Punjab’s stable, a strong top order batting, and then a clinical finish to win the match. Shaun Marsh’s consistent run of form has obviously helped, but what is also surprising is that most of the players that have partnered Shaun Marsh at the top have done well for themselves as well. So out of 13 fifty or more run partnerships that the Kings XI Punjab players have been involved in, seven have come for the first and the second wickets, thus proving how well the top three batsmen have played for the Kings XI Punjab team. If you compare this with the other team at 18 points, Rajasthan Royals, they have fourteen 50 or more run partnerships in this tournament so far, out of which only 5 have come for the first two wickets, 9 for the next three. This shows that Rajasthan Royals is not as dependent on the top three as the Kings XI Punjab.

Another interesting statistic that pops up is the percentage of runs accumulated by the highest scorer of both the teams. For the Rajasthan Royals, Shane Watson leads the pack with 352 runs out of the 1576 scored by the Royals themselves. This works out to around 22% of the team total. The top scorer for the Kings XI Punjab is obviously Shaun Marsh, and he has amassed 438 runs in the tournament out of a total of 1846 that his team, Punjab has scored so far. This works out to be almost 24% of the team’s total score, which is more than that for the Royals. But there is a caveat to this. Shaun Marsh had missed out on the first four matches that his team played in this tournament, which means that the percentage of the runs he has scored out of the total runs scored in the matches he has participated in goes up to a whopping 40!

This again emphasizes the over reliance of the Kings XI Punjab on Shaun Marsh as a batsman. If the Rajasthan Royals – or for that matter any other team –are smart enough, they would want to pick up Shaun Marsh’s wicket early by being more aggressive. Alternatively, they could act smarter by choking Marsh’s boundaries, and frustrating him at the non-striker’s end for longer periods of times.

Having said that, it would be interesting to note that Yuvraj Singh seems to be itching to explode, and it might just be the same day when Shaun Marsh encounters a mathematical truth that goes by the name of ‘Law of Averages!’