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IPL 2025: Is the world's biggest cricket league ready for its first 300+ score?
Summary
As the IPL edges closer to a historic 300+ total, cricket's shortest format is redefining the game. With flat pitches, power hitters, and the impact player rule, the IPL is now a bowler’s nightmare
To begin, a simple prediction—the first 300-plus score in the IPL will be scored this season.
Who will bet against this? On 22 March, in Sunrisers Hyderabad’s (SRH’s) game in Hyderabad against Rajasthan Royals (RR), the home team amassed 286 runs, on the back of 12 sixes and 34 boundaries in 20 overs—nearly a boundary every second ball for the duration of the innings.
Such is the ease with which batters have hammered bowlers, that RR managed 242 in the chase. This was not even the highest score in the IPL, which is also held by SRH, when they hit 287 against Royal Challengers Bengaluru (RCB) last season.
The IPL, which sets the standards for T20 cricket in the world, and, by extension, all cricket, is becoming more and more frenzied when it comes to big-hitting. For many years since its inception in 2008, powerplay scores in the IPL have hovered around 60—last season, it averaged nearly 75. Nine of the top 10 innings totals in the IPL were made in the last season and this season. Two hundred plus totals have become the norm.
There is no doubt about it; ever since T20 came into the picture, the focus for cricket’s administrators, tirelessly pushed on by the broadcasters, has been to make it a six-hitting carnival of ever-increasing high scores. Pitches have gotten flatter and more even paced (anything that does not play by the big-hitting rulebook is immediately fixed), grounds are smaller, bats are bigger and heavier, and fielding restrictions as well as the “impact player" rule introduced in the 2023 season of IPL, where a team can introduce one substitute per match for either batting or bowling purposes—team’s overwhelmingly use this to give an extra batter a go—have made the IPL a bowler’s nightmare.
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Who will save the bowlers then? How long will they be, to use an old phrase that is particularly apt, cannon fodder?
“You may as well call our sport Batting, not Cricket," said the South African pacer Kagiso Rabada in an interview with The Indian Express earlier this month.
Last year, former BCCI (Board of Control for Cricket in India) president and India captain Sourav Ganguly talked about the ever-increasing imbalance in the game between bat and ball: “Not easy for the bowlers. They are being carted all over and that’s one area that needs to be looked at in the future, the balance between bat and ball," Ganguly said at a press conference.
But it’s just one more tepid remark in a sea of such quotes that lead to no actionable change.
In an interview to Cricket Monthly during last season’s IPL, former Australia captain Ricky Ponting, who has coached in the IPL for nearly a decade, said, “I didn’t think a 300 score would ever be possible, but it looks like it’s going to be. With this impact player rule as well, it’s allowing more freedom to batters. They’re going out there and just going from ball one."
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Ponting, who is currently coaching Punjab Kings, added, “There’s some pretty crazy things happening. Certainly with the last two IPLs, with the impact player rule coming in, it’s gone from being a game that’s dominated by defence to a game that’s now being dominated by attack."
Apart from the way the pitch and the rules are set up, batters too have evolved to hit, hit hard, and hit without a break.
There are two pillars on which this batting evolution stands. One is psychological—batters are told by coaches and team officials to go out and hit without fear, if possible from the first ball. In the shortest version of the game, the fall of a wicket does not carry much importance. If the decision is between hitting and getting out, or doing the classical batter’s thing of playing with technique but not scoring at a manic pace, it’s better to get out. Strategically, that’s the only thing that makes sense in T20s, and increasingly in ODIs. The concept holds such sway over cricket now that Brendon McCullum made it the cornerstone of England’s approach—“Bazball"—whether playing T20s, Tests, or ODIs, when he was coach.
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“Travis Head in Dharamsala (2023 World Cup game vs New Zealand), he literally went out and just swung at everyone right from the start," Ponting said. “You can’t do that if you’re scared of getting out. The default setting now for batting is T20 and then everything else works around that. It was never that way."
To go with this psychological and strategic approach, batters now also train very differently, with the focus being on generating power, swinging hard and clearing the boundary ropes, rather than on different strokes and techniques. Batters also have a preference now for using throwdown machines instead of being bowled to by a real bowler at the nets.
This helps in training two things—reaction time, because the bowling machine offers no cues, unlike a bowler, when the ball is released. A batter is pretty much hitting blindly at the incoming projectile from a machine. The second is consistency—the batter can set the machine to bowl the same delivery over and over, till he has embedded the reaction time and the power needed to send that particular delivery over the boundary in his muscle memory.
For the time being, there is little romance left in bowling. This is not the age of Shane Warne bowling the “ball of the century", or Muttiah Muralitharan’s magical “doosra", Wasim Akram and Waqar Younis reverse-swinging in tandem, Dennis Lillee or Jeff Thomson steaming in like soldiers on the charge, or the batting apocalypse caused by the West Indian quartet of Roberts, Holding, Croft and Marshall bowling at extreme pace and accuracy, on pitches that made batters fear for their lives.
Apparently, cricket has space for only one thing now—a big swing that sends the ball soaring into the stands. IPL 2025, bring on that 300-plus score!
Rudraneil Sengupta is the author of Enter the Dangal, Travels through India’s Wrestling Landscape.
