🏏 What can cricket fans expect from the 2024 WPL?

My Week in Sport(s): women's T20, an unlikely Super Bowl underdog and the Crusaders in Ireland

Welcome to My Week in Sport(s) — a new regular newsletter from Plot the Ball.

In this edition:

• 🏏 Looking ahead to the WPL’s second season

• 🏈 The 2023 Kansas City Chiefs doing things differently

• 🏉 A familiar style of rugby in unfamiliar surroundings

---

---

🏏 What can cricket fans expect from the 2024 WPL?

In last week’s newsletter, we looked at how athletes’ performance levels translate between competitions.

Most of the uncertainty around how a given individual’s outputs will stack up in a new context derives from changing talent levels and strategic approaches, as we talked about regarding new Los Angeles Dodgers pitcher Yoshinobu Yamamoto.

But there are also much more practical issues¹ that can affect athletes — and the shape of a sport in general — across tournaments.

In baseball and cricket, for example, the dimensions of the playing area are generally not required to be consistent between grounds or between tournaments — and the resulting differences can have a major impact on the balance between bat and ball.

This was blindingly obvious to any fans of T20 cricket who followed last year’s Women’s Premier League: the competition set up by the Board of Control for Cricket in India as its counterpart in the women’s game to the world-leading IPL.

In the inaugural edition of the WPL, scoring rates were much higher than in the women’s game’s other flagship T20 competition: Australia’s WBBL, which I’ve written about a number of times in the past.

In last year’s WBBL, which took place between October and December 2023, teams scored 1.17 runs per ball off the bat on average.

In March’s WPL, by contrast, the competition average was 1.28 runs scored per ball. This gap in scoring rate resulted in a considerable difference of just over 13 runs off the bat per team innings.

And a major cause of this higher-than-normal rate of scoring was in fact the size of the playing area at the two grounds which hosted matches.

According to reporting by ESPNCricinfo during the tournament, boundaries were considerably shorter than usual:

“The boundary ropes have been pulled in to measure as short as 42 or 44 metres on one part of the ground, and the BCCI has reportedly set a cap of 60 metres for the longest boundary, compared to 65 at the Women's T20 World Cup last month.”

Looking at a pair of metrics we’ve previously used² to analyse batting in white-ball cricket — effective boundary percentage, and non-boundary strike rate — we can see that this was particularly impactful at one of the two grounds used in WPL 2023: the Brabourne Stadium in Mumbai.

It was the fastest-scoring venue of any which hosted matches in the 2023 editions of the WPL or WBBL — by 7.6 runs per team innings — because of the extent to which the layout favoured boundary hitters.

Batters at Brabourne recorded an effective boundary percentage of 23% during the 2023 WPL. Across the entirety of last year’s WBBL, the equivalent figure was just 17%.

The WPL’s second venue — the DY Patil Stadium — also had a higher effective boundary percentage than any WBBL ground³.

The different styles of cricket manufactured in the sport’s two biggest T20 competitions are evident, then. What’s more, we can be pretty confident that these differences are not down to the batting talent on display.

Because of the truncated nature of the WBBL and WPL, a number of the world’s top T20 batters were available to play in both tournaments — and nearly everyone took advantage of the more favourable scoring environment in India.

13 of the 16 players who faced at least 60 deliveries in the 2023 edition of both leagues⁴ recorded a higher scoring rate in the WPL than the WBBL.

Australian veterans Jess Jonassen and Ellyse Perry were the only two players in this cohort who scored faster in the WBBL than they did in the WPL, while Grace Harris recorded an exceptional return of 1.66 runs per ball in both competitions.

In contrast, their compatriots Meg Lanning, Tahlia McGrath (whose T20 game we’ve talked about previously) and Ash Gardner all benefited significantly⁵ — but it was actually two young English batters who seemed to get the most out of the WPL’s set-up.

Sophia Dunkley and Alice Capsey both scored more than 0.5 runs per ball faster in India in March 2023 than they managed in Australia later in the year — and did so by recording effective boundary rates that were twice as high⁶.

At 19 years old, Capsey will return to the 2024 WPL as the youngest overseas player named in any franchise’s squad — but Dunkley has opted out of the upcoming edition, citing the amount of international cricket she is set to play later this year.

Until the competition establishes itself as an essential part of the women’s cricket calendar, such conflicts of interest are likely to continue; Capsey herself will miss the first three T20 Internationals that England are scheduled to play in New Zealand next month because of her participation in the tournament.

But sporting competitions benefit from having a distinctive identity, and the characteristic style of play which the WPL has already developed should help it achieve that status over the next few seasons⁷.

Even though the 2024 edition will be played at a different pair of grounds when it starts up again in two weeks’ time, I would be surprised if the BCCI moved away from a template which helps it stand out from the rest of women’s T20⁸ — and has already proven effective at bringing in local crowds:

“During the 2013 Women's World Cup, the ICC sent out nearly 10,000 invites to as many as 50 schools in Mumbai for the opening game, held at Brabourne, and when not even 2000 seats were occupied, it left the ICC and the BCCI red-faced. A decade later, the contrast is stark. Both WPL venues - Brabourne and DY Patil Stadium - were sold to capacity several times over.”

If anything, they might be tempted to shorten the boundaries even more — and squeeze in a few additional seats.

---

---

🏈 Run the Numbers

Two things that are probably true going into Sunday’s Super Bowl in Las Vegas: Patrick Mahomes is the best quarterback in the NFL, and his Kansas City Chiefs haven’t played as well as their opponents — the San Francisco 49ers — have this season.

When a franchise puts together multiple consecutive years of elite performance — and this is the Chiefs’ fourth Super Bowl appearance in six seasons with Mahomes as their starter — it’s tempting to look back and condense their success into one simple storyline.

But the 2023 Chiefs are markedly different to the other teams Mahomes has taken this deep into the postseason.

According to Pro Football Reference’s Simple Rating System, they were a much worse offensive team in the regular season than they were in 2019, 2020 and 2022 — and much stronger defensively. Combine their marks on both sides of the ball, and they grade out considerably worse overall than the 49ers do⁹.

Mahomes, of course, has led them to three playoff victories already this winter — so maybe the team has turned a corner.

But — as

Kevin Cole

noted in his Super Bowl preview last week — we shouldn’t be too quick to discard the evidence of the regular season:

“The Mahomes run in these playoffs has been magical…[b]ut looking at the entire season of ups and downs gives a stronger impression that there could be another lull coming…Maybe the Chiefs offense has been solved with the emergence of Rashee Rice and Marquez Valdes-Scantling remembering how to catch a football, or maybe there will be regression in the Super Bowl.”

---

🏉 Watch the Games

Munster have a long history of playing matches against touring opponents from overseas — and it’s something that has managed to survive into rugby union’s professional era.

I was fortunate to be at Páirc Uí Chaoimh in Cork last Saturday to watch the Irish province take on the Crusaders, a Super Rugby franchise from New Zealand who are currently touring the Northern Hemisphere as part of their preseason.

The match was played in front of a lively capacity crowd of 40,000 people — but my favourite moment of the game was one which sucked a bit of the energy out of the stadium.

The try the Crusaders scored to close the gap on the scoreboard to 14-7 began — in typical style — from a phase of play in their own half of the field.

And it came about the way these tries from deep so often do: skilful passing in tight spaces to create an initial opportunity, followed by an almost comically easy finish for the player in support of the breakout.

Mitchell Drummond — the Crusaders’ scrum-half — doesn’t follow the ball after making the first pass of the phase from a ruck in the middle of the field. Instead, he jogs towards the spot where his teammates will be if they do manage to break through the defensive line.

He’s rewarded for his anticipation just 10 seconds later. The Crusaders work the ball past the two Munster players defending in the backfield, and Drummond strolls over unopposed from 25 metres.

You can watch a clip of this sequence here.

---

---

The next edition of My Week in Sport(s) will be published in two weeks, on Saturday February 24th.

1. One of the issues Shohei Ohtani faced in moving from NPB to MLB (and which Yamamoto will have to adapt to): the different ball used in North American baseball.

2. I proposed effective boundary percentage as a better measure of boundary hitting in T20 cricket in this piece at the start of last year, and used both metrics to look at Shubman Gill’s batting in 50-over cricket in September.

3. Interestingly, however, it only had the fifth-highest overall scoring rate of the grounds in the plot above; a handful of Australian grounds had boundary rates not far off DY Patil’s, but much higher scoring rates off all non-boundary deliveries.

4. Only one Indian player — Mumbai Indians captain Harmanpreet Kaur — played in last year’s WBBL, and she had a much better time on home soil: she scored at a tick over a run a ball in Australia, compared to 1.35 runs per ball in the WPL.

5. Lanning’s scoring rate fell from 1.39 runs per ball in India in March to 1.20 in Australia in December; McGrath’s scoring rate fell from 1.58 runs per ball to 1.20, and Gardner’s fell from 1.42 runs per ball to 1.11.

6. Dunkley scored at 1.75 runs per ball in the WPL, with a 34% effective boundary rate; those figures dropped to 1.10 and 15% in the WBBL. Capsey’s WPL record was 1.56/31%, and her WBBL record was 1.06/15%.

7. In combination, of course, with the financial heft of the BCCI, and the security of a multi-year TV rights deal.

8. Jarrod Kimber summarised his view of the differences between men’s and women’s T20 well in this piece: “Women score quicker with fewer boundaries…This is a completely different form of batting. The men are playing a power game, the women are playing a space game.”

9. Pro Football Reference has the Chiefs’ at +3.7 in their regular-season SRS ratings, and the 49ers at +11.8 — close to an eight-point spread.