The IPL's Selection Signal Issue

Diverging from T20Is

The Indian Premier League has undoubtedly revolutionised Indian cricket. With unprecedented amounts of money enriching the Indian cricket system, resources have improved, player salaries have gone up, and cricket is a financially secure viable career for many more players today than it was twenty years ago. On the field as well, young Indian players have enriching exposure to the best cricketers from all over the world like never before. But we must stop and ask: in its current form, what good and bad is the IPL doing for Indian cricket?

The IPL does not exist to enrich the Indian cricket team, but rather as a private money-making entity. Despite this, it remains the best arena for Indian players to hone and showcase their skills at the shortest format, in addition to being the best audition for a spot on the India T20 team. How is it faring on the counts of preparing Indian players and showing their mettle for international cricket?

I first want to specifically talk about the recent turn of the IPL, with the Impact Player and increasingly flatter pitches.

It is clear that playing with 8-9 batters on account of essentially having 12-vs-12 cricket has freed up batters to play more aggressively. Strike rates have gone up across phases and across lengths over the last three years. Even the good length strike rate in the Powerplay in 2025 was around 150, up from about 120 three years ago. There are two aspects, linked in series, to hitting in T20: intent and execution. These two exist in a complex feedback loop: higher intent comes from better execution, but better execution is the result of more intent and more practice. The modification of the game state with the extra batter first led to higher intent, which led batters to try more attacking shots. This then gradually improved their execution as they played more and more attacking shots.

Most importantly, this feedback loop of trying to hit more and succeeding at it (due to flatter pitches) shifted the baseline of intent: batters now just know they can hit. In the early years of the IPL, conventional thinking held them back. Now, the range of possibilities has increased — batters have seen clearly that higher strike rates are possible, which enables them to have more intent in general. Like a shifting of a “batting Overton window”.

The Indian team under Rohit Sharma and Rahul Dravid had already started moving away from staid batting in T20s in 2023. The Indian side in 2025 is a natural progression of that, with a steady feed of hitters with high intent supplied by the new avatar of the IPL.

But does this translate well to international cricket? Shot-making in T20 is a high-speed activity. As such, it is highly sensitive to minute variations in the pace and more importantly, bounce of a pitch. Playing on flatter pitches shifts the intent of Indian batters higher, but if the pitch deviates from the standard conditions seen in the IPL, high-intent shot execution takes a hit. Thus, the pitches in the IPL might be contributing a false sense of achievement when it comes to high-octane T20 hitting.

In this flawed translation from the IPL to the tougher pitches in T20Is too, there is a spectrum. This is purely conjecture, but I think that the stability of execution across conditions is a function of a batter’s baseline hitting ability and shot profile. To elaborate, I think the more you tend towards classical batting, the more your strike rates are inflated artificially by Impact Player / IPL pitches, making your execution less likely to translate to tougher conditions. As a more “classical” batter, you tend to rely more on conventional shots, which can be thwarted by movement and bounce coupled with accurate bowling. In the IPL, the former doesn’t exist for the most part, and the latter too is not very frequent. Thus, the differences between the elite and the average hitters are flattened.

My theory is that the only batters who can really translate hitting to tricky conditions are either extremely solid hitters (think Kohli vs pace) or those who have crossed the limits of high-intent batting (think Abhishek Sharma). In Abhishek’s case, the Hyderabad pitch has unlocked an intent so high that his shot profile and execution have improved to transcend tricky conditions. This is prompted by his knock at the MGC — which also involved some luck in terms of matchups — but his general performances in T20Is across slow and fast conditions lend some support to this very nebulous theory. The bottom line is that the advantage of high intent translating across conditions is like a step function: it increases massively after a high intent barrier. A large mass of batters in the middle of the distribution have simply upped their strike rates without really building a robust hitting game.

This brings me to the question of the IPL as a selection signal for India. The IPL is a very capricious tournament, 14 matches at different grounds in a highly volatile format, with seasons separated by 10 months. It can be almost impossible to predict a batter’s season based on the previous ones, and form can be extremely fickle. Take Tilak and Abhishek, who did not have the most stellar IPL seasons in 2025, but are setting the world on fire in T20Is. With the inflation of SRs in the IPL, the divergent team structures with 8-9 batters, and the flat pitches, how much does the IPL tell us about a batter’s skill in international cricket? It can serve as the perfect test with its high quality of cricket and the best international players participating, but as it steadily diverges from the format and dynamics of T20Is, its signal is going to get exceedingly unreliable.

As it stands, advanced ball-tracking data is not used for selection. Vanilla strike rates and averages are not enough to profile players. The chief selector has very ably relied on his judgement of quality to build the Indian side, which has worked well to date. However, it remains to be seen if selecting the T20 side will become more and more divorced from the short-term signals provided by the IPL, which yields a high volume of granular data, pregnant with the potential for advanced tracking of players.

As bad as the situation is for batters, it is worse for bowlers. Run rates and first-order statistics give next to no signal about bowling in the modern IPL. Performance is becoming increasingly de-correlated with conventional attributes like the percentage of “good” balls. Batters have successfully de-linked their shot choice from the line and length of the delivery, which means pretty much anything can go the distance. IPL pitches are seeing unprecedentedly low amounts of turn, prompting spinners to go shorter and quicker. Pacers are bowling more wides and short balls to evade the ever-increasing hitting arcs of batters. While this is improving bowler skill at multiple levels, it makes the IPL essentially useless for gathering signals about bowlers for selection. What works in T20Is in terms of lengths and variations is starting to differ from what works in the IPL. The selectors and team management need to back long-term quality, and more importantly, select on attributes rather than IPL performances, which might need advanced data analysis.