We were watching the India-South Africa T20 World Cup 2022 match on Sunday (October 30th). As K L Rahul was dismissed for yet another low score, a friend vehemently mentioned that Rahul fails to perform against top teams and feasts on middling bowling attacks. He added that he does well in the IPL where bowling attacks are inferior to top international teams and Rahul is invariably found out in these situations.
I instinctively agreed with him at the time. But later on felt the need to put his first statement to test against what the numbers say.
ESPN Cricinfo’s statsguru is the source data for the tables and charts that follow. I have purely focused on Rahul’s batting in T20 International’s (T20I).
KL Rahul’s overall T20I numbers are impressive. A strike rate approaching 140 and average shy of 40, with 28 50+ scores in 65 innings are noteworthy.
I have categorised the opposition into three large buckets- SENAP (South Africa, England, New Zealand, Australia and Pakistan), Non-SENAP Test nations (Sri Lanka, Bangladesh, West Indies, Afghanistan and Zimbabwe) and Associates.
It is relatively safe to assume that the SENAP teams have best bowling attacks while the associates the least.
Clearly, he has far superior numbers against the associates versus other countries. Albeit, he has only batted against the associates on 5 occasions as opposed to 35 times against the SENAP countries.
The next step is to assess the impact of playing home and away against these countries. The overall trend remains the same, however he performs marginally better away against SENAP countries vs home. The reverse is true for the non-SENAP test nations.
At this stage, my friends’ statement seems spot on. We could further dig into home venues and bowler types to assess whether he is more susceptible to fast bowling on pacy pitches. I feel this is the case but am refraining from analyzing this aspect.
Instead, I have decided to look at time frames to understand whether this under-performance is a recent phenomenon or has always been the case. To start with, this is a break up of his matches and runs scored by year. His numbers have dropped noticeably since hitting a peak in 2020 despite the high volume of matches in the past 20 months.
His cumulative average and strike rate has gone down over the years as seen below. This is cause for clear concern and yet he did perform in the recent series against South Africa. Matches 46-69 were played since 2021.
I have further categorised this across three timeframes and the type of opposition.
The above shows two things – K L Rahul has struggled against quality attacks and feasted on inferior ones. However, this is a more recent phenomenon (2021/22) and part of a general decline in performance.
So my friends statement while true, was only applicable to the past two years.