Watching this year’s IPL season, it was hard to miss the all-too-convenient turn of events for some of the teams. Especially, RCB. I’ve watched very few of the matches in the season but of the few that I did, I had this nagging feeling of something fishy going on in the last few overs.
There’s certainly some amount of fixing going on in these games. Lots of money involved. Greed at this stage is an easy agent. Many players (Indians) will probably never make it to the next season nor play for the Indian team and the lure for easy money - you just have to bowl badly at crucial junctures - is pretty obvious.
Given IPL’s fixing history (which I have yet to read more about at the time of writing this note), I think there’s enough reasons to suspect that there was some amount of fixing. Whether it was a match- or a spot- needs to be investigated.
What we are looking for is patterns where the game appears to change rapidly, tipping the odds massively in favor of one team. Those crucial death overs, as my brother and co-conspirator in this analysis puts it.
My preliminary search for ball-by-ball analysis of the game was insufficient as I couldn’t find a source. But it turns out that there is indeed a record of the ball-by-ball commentary. Soorya just sent it to me and that’s a big relief. We can scour through it instead of sitting through each of the matches again (and finding full match videos is harder).
I think - and this is pure hypothesis - that we should start scrutinizing RCB matches first.
We don’t even know what metrics can shed a spark of light on an underlying discrepancy in the game so that’s the first part of the entire scraping process. Need to find out the metrics that characteristically show some anomaly in the game.
Some of the initial ideas are:
- a bowler performing well in the first spell and performing badly in the death overs (Soorya noted this)
- a bad bowler being sent to bowl in the death over (may show that the captain was biased/tipping the odds forcibly)
- a batsman playing slow (harder to figure this out esp if it’s in the middle overs)
As I write this, I realize that we should start with the verdict of the matches. The ones that ended in a close-call. “Gujrat Lions won by 3 wickets (0 balls remaining).” Or “Gujrat Lions won by 6 wickets (3 balls remainig)”.
Side-note: Gujrat Lions seems to have won a lot of such matches. Super-close-call matches.
One possible scheme of approach:
- identify teams involved in the close-call matches
- identify bowlers involved in these games
- identify their bowling performances in their first spells and last spells and mark how different these are
So let’s see. Soorya has said he’ll look for the close-call matches. I’m looking at matches involving RCB. At this point, it does sound like we’re biased against RCB but hopefully, that bias will either be proved right or we’ll change our minds.