IPL 2024: How The Teams Stack Up

Mumbai Indians: If the owners of Mumbai Indians could get Rihanna to dance at their pre-wedding, after her tweeting against them, make the three Khans lock steps together like marionettes on a string of cash, and leave Mark Zuckerberg to feel like yuppie middle class out-flexed by their richer cousins on the basis of the watch on his wrist, you can bet they have assembled a blockbuster of a team. Mumbai Indians made a couple of wrong bets in the last mega-auction, but the privilege of being the richest family in the country is that you can always outbuy your way out of a corner. In this case, “woh bhi peeche se angootha lagake”, buying Hardik Pandya from the Titans, throwing to the wind all pretense of fairness of equal purse, and if there is anything we know about Hardik after his interview on Karan Johar, that’s the way he likes it. Rohit Sharma, Ishan Kishan, Suryakumar Yadav, Tilak Verma, Hardik Pandya are a 1 to 5 of a national line-up, and then there is Bumrah, in case you have forgotten. Did I say “national line up”? Scratch that, this is even better, because while in Indian colors, these players may get injured from time to time, but put them on the Jio network, their signal never drops, whether it be on the field or playing “rumaal chor” to entertain the family at Antilla. Add to it this, God in the stands, and the Son of God on the bench, and how can this team lose?

Sure, their bowling seems weak, though, with their superstrong Indian core, they are the only franchise that can play 3 specialist foreign bowlers. However, their real problem is going to be whether they are a house divided. It’s no secret that Hardik Pandya pulled a “Margdarshak Mandal” move on Rohit Sharma, and as happens in a corporate coup, this creates bad blood in the line of succession. Add to it the rather dodgy choice of Mark Boucher as a coach, who has had a contentious time in South Africa, and Mumbai Indians look like a house divided. But, if you ask me, I put my trust in cash to unite all divisions, it is the adhesive glue for the most astringent of souls, and if there is anything the pre-wedding jamboree proved, it is this.

Lucknow Super Giants: This franchise is like the Yashwant Sinha of franchises—they make a lot of noise but no one cares. Last time, at least the excitement was around if Gautam Gambhir or his sock-puppet, Naveen ul-Haq, would get into a physical scuffle against old bete noire, but this time around, even that excitement won’t be there. The rumor is that K L Rahul, the Romeo to the Juliet of his own batting statistics, wants to bat middle-order to hone his skills for the T20 World Cup, and that is why they imported Devdutt Padikkal to be their opener. However, I find it tough to believe that KL will let go of the opportunity to have long innings to his name, in the only domain he fully controls.

The problem with LSG is that the Indian core they bet on at the last mega-auction, their promise has withered away. Deepak Hooda is now the second most famous Hooda in this country after Randeep, and Krunal Pandya is now the most well-liked Pandya brother in the country. Marcus Stoinis’s reliability, both in terms of performance and fitness, is at the level of a Premier Padmini from the ’90s, leaving the responsibility of making impactful scores to De Kock and Pooran, while K L Rahul generates Fantasy Points for those who have him on their team. Add to it that they have transferred out Avesh Khan and then lost their Mark Wood, their bowling looks flaccid, and with that their potential.

Sunrisers Hyderabad: The fans of this franchise targeted me last time with merciless online trolling for saying they had the worst team before the tournament began, and I want to tell these fans I bear no animus to them or this franchise, for they proved me right by coming dead last on the points table. Ever since their very public falling out with David Warner, their talismanic performer, I have felt that this franchise has struggled with player-management relations, along with bad auction table performance, though for some poetic reason, no one seems to point that out much. Their principal problem lies in the lack of a strong Indian batting core—Mayank Agarwal is no Shikhar Dhawan, Rahul Tripathi is inconsistent, Abdul Samad is “who now?” and Abhishek Sharma is their only reliable Indian talent, though nowhere a first India-XI pick.

Fans of SRH will say and with some justification that, even in their best years, they never had a strong Indian batting core but were bailed out by good Indian bowlers, and their foreign talent: Rashid Khan and David Warner. The Indian bowling talent seems tired: Bhuvi bowls at a pace a French lover would consider too slow, Umran Malik is now the Shehla Rashid of bowling in that those who placed their trust in them in the early stages of their career are solely disappointed by how they turned out, the glory days of T Natarajan seem long gone like those of the once-ubiquitous Nataraj pencils, and Washington Sundar and Shahbaz Ahmed will not win you matches with their spinning.

This leaves their hopes in the hands of their foreign core. Last time, they went all-in for the flavor of the year but “Harry Brook Bewafa Hai”. This time, they blew their purse on Pat Cummins, and then made him their captain. Now as a fan of the franchise that used to have Pat Cummins, let me tell you that the Cummins that plays for Australia and the one that turns up for IPL is the difference between Shakespeare and a ChatGPT simulation of Shakespeare, you are impressed initially, but stare it for a while and you realize something is off. Their better buys are Hasaranga at a surprisingly low price and the person who might be a potential Warner in terms of their aggression, talent, and attitude to batting: Travis Head. They look poised to do better than they did last time, and the only reason I say so is because of Head, and no I am not saying this for fear of being attacked by SRH fans.

Gujarat Titans: In a tournament started by a Modi and now controlled by a Shah, the Gujarat Titans can never be far from the crown. In terms of a squad, they have belied analysis. With what they have had on paper they have no business winning IPL and coming runners-up in their two years of existence, and yet they have, and one cannot blame EVMs here either. Their secret, I believe, has been the brains of Ashish Nehra, and if there is something that IPL has taught us, it is as much the player as well as the way the player is managed, and someone who can get match-winning performances out of Vijay Shankar and transforms Shubman Gill into a beast opener and David Miller into a late-career superstar and rescues Mohit Sharma from watering plants at a retirement home, is SOMETHING. So, even though the team once again looks weak on paper, now with a Hardik size hole and then a Shami sized one, it would take a brave man to bet against the guys who play their home games in the Narendra Modi stadium.

For the Titans to make the playoffs, new captain Gill needs to have another 800-run series, because he is the only Indian T20 first XI level player in the team, with consistent performances needed from Sai Sudarshan. Given their bare cupboard in terms of A-level Indian stars and the untested foreign core of Omarzai and Spencer Johnson, the pressure will be intense on the world’s best T20 player, Rashid Khan, to hold up a weak bowling unit. Not that the Titans cannot do it, and I would never write them off as it is a franchise like CSK that gets the best out of seemingly mediocre players (I would be very curious how Shahrukh Khan does, having transferred out of one of the franchises that does not manage players well) but given the trick their richest son of soil played on them, IPL 2024 might be a bridge too far for even this group of over-achievers.

Royal Challengers Bangalore: When Mumbai Indians “bought” Pandya off-auction, they had spent so much money that they would not have been able to put a full squad on the park. In came RCB, like electoral bonds from an anonymous source, and “saved them” (and I use the air quotes in full cognizance) by giving them the green to fill their team by taking Cameron Green off them. Now I am not saying that Green won’t be a good addition on the green of Chinnaswamy, but what that led to was RCB essentially fielding a Hong Kong Six of a team, in that it is a team of 6 batsmen and no bowlers.

Just like its once owner didn’t believe in paying back banks, Bangalore has never believed in having bowlers, after all this is the team that had Dinda. To buy Green, they had to sell Hazelwood, Hasaranga, and Harshal, the full core of their bowling. Since they play their home games on the best batting pitch of all the venues, with the bowling attack they have now, it does not matter how much Kohli, Faf, Green, Patidar, and Maxwell score, their opponents will always back themselves to score one more. Given that Faf, Maxwell, and Green will play, that leaves only one foreign bowler slot (so only one of Alzarri Joseph, Lockie Ferguson, and Reece Topley can slot in) and they have no specialist spinner worth their name, which means their bowling attack is cannon fodder in Chennai. Even their batting looks suspect—Faf is a retired player with diminishing potential every year, Kartik is mostly a commentator who plays a tournament to get ready for IPL and then plays IPL, Patidar’s confidence is likely broken after his disastrous Test series, and on top of this all, they have the pressure of knowing their bowling line-up is arguably one of the worst RCB has ever had, and that is saying a lot. Will they get their cup this year? The women’s team has broken the jinx, but as for the men, I shall leave it at “Ah well”.

Punjab Kings: During the last IPL auctions, something very interesting and very significant happened. There were two players with the same name, and Punjab Kings bought the one they did not want. The auctioneer said “It was a wrong name? You don’t want the player?” and Ness Wadia was protesting in the way you talk to customer service after finding a rock in the box in which you were expecting an iPhone, but the auctioneer held the “You break, you buy” line. That’s how Punjab Kings ended up with the wrong Shashank Singh. To make matters worse, they later denied buying the wrong player, even though video footage showed otherwise.

To me, finally, all Punjab King’s selection strategies suddenly made sense. Kind of.

Why did they take a player by the name of Viswanath Pratap Singh in the auction? Because they wanted a leader who was once ruled a country maybe? Maybe they selected Baltej Dhanda because they wanted someone who hurls the “ball” “tej” but with an eye on profitability, the Dhanda part, and once they found he was neither, they let him go. Maybe someone said we wanted a backup for Shikhar Dhawan, and they selected Rishi Dhawan, because Dhawan-Dhawan same-same, and maybe Shahrukh Khan on whom they splurged 9 crores, and then put back in the auction after a few years, was not the Shahrukh Khan they wanted to buy, Maybe Priety Zinta wanted a Karan to Mumbai Indian’s Arjun Tendulkar, and ended up with a Curran, maybe they wanted one Chahar and got the other—-who knows?

Which is a pity. Punjab Kings, unlike many teams, has a decent core of Indian talent—Harshal Patel, Arshdeep Singh, the Chahar with the better hairstyle, Jitesh Sharma, Prabhsimran Singh, Atharva Taide, and of course, Shikhar Dhawan, an IPL legend at the close of his career, but their foreign core seems always to be hastily assembled, bought in a frenzy in a duty-free shop before the plane departs, random than through thought, a coherence there but never GoodEnough, a shadow of what could have been a better team.

Maybe that’s why they are seldom contenders. They have always wanted someone, but ended up with someone else, like in that Ms. Zinta movie where she wants Saif Ali Khan but settles with Chandrachud Singh, or as the song went “end-table finish, Kya Kehna…”

Delhi Capitals: One of the most entertaining sights at the IPL auction has been Delhi Capitals uncle, getting into pitched auctions just to jack up prices, and sometimes ending up with the player, but mostly not, and then smiling through, reveling in the gentle joy of screwing things up for everyone, basically what their chief minister of Delhi does for opposition unity. Ricky Ponting as the coach is united in spirit with the spirit of the host city, but the franchise itself has struggled to define a character for itself in the rich history of IPL, except as being the direct successor of the franchise that has bought every IPL legend: De Villiers, Maxwell, Russell, Warner, Tejaswi Yadav, and then allowed them to leave.

Well, Warner has come back, and even at the end of his career, he remains their most reliable resource, and that in itself remains the biggest indictment of the Capitals. Of course, Rishabh Pant makes a return, but given his long layoff and his patchy T20 form even before his accident, expectations should be low. Harry Brook was someone they put a lot of money into, and he has withdrawn, leaving the batting looking sparse. Mitchell Marsh seldom plays three games without getting injured, the healthcare quality of Washington Post-endorsed mohalla clinics of Delhi notwithstanding, Fraser-McGurk might be caught out against quality spin, and with Prithwi Shaw you never know which player shows up: the grumpy, double-chin uncle, coming to pick up a fight, after downing a few beers and butter chicken or the free-flowing inheritor of the legacy of Sehwag’s batting.

This is a pity, because Delhi has a formidable bowling line-up—Axar Patel and Kuldeep Yadav forming one of the most potent spin attacks of IPL, and Khaleel and Mukesh Kumar provide for a varied Indian seam lineup, leaving room for Nortje/Richardson to be the spearhead. One of Yash Dhull and Kumar Kushagra should start out, and if they click, then yes, Delhi might be a contender, but if they don’t, they can always blame L(S)G and say “Marcusji karne naheen dete”.

Rajasthan Royals: I have often wondered what Royals see in Riyan Parag. I guess they keep him in the team unless it is for the social media clout of his onfield celebrations and aggression, which I think is called “expressing yourself”. He has had a tremendous domestic season, capped off by a celebration where he gestured that there is no one at his level, which might ironically be true, but it remains to be seen if his high idea of self is backed up by his performance. If it
does, then there is very little that can stop Royals.

The Royals have come a long way from the days of being in the shadow of its previous celebrity owners. They are no longer the moneyball team nor the team that takes money for balls, but have emerged as a powerhouse, albeit one that has underperformed, given the talent it has. An Indian core that is neighbor’s envy, owner’s pride with Jaiswal, Samson, Jurel, Ashwin, Avesh Khan and Chahal, with a foreign core of Buttler, Hetmeyer, Powell and Boult with back-ups for all foreign players in Burger (for Boult), Kohler-Cadmore (for Buttler), and Donovan Ferrera (Hetmeyer/Powell), with the flexibility to use Zampa when the pitches become tired at the end of the season, Royals have all their bases covered.

One could of course nitpick on the trade of Avesh for Padikkal, given Avesh’s poor form of late, but then with Prasidh Krishna injured, this indeed was a fortuitous transaction, and I was surprised by their aggressive pursuit of Powell, given they had Hetmeyer, a very similar player. I feel Rajasthan would have been served better retaining Jason Holder, given the type of pitches we see in Jaipur, and giving Sachin Pilot what he wanted instead of giving in to Ashok Gehlot. But barring this, there is very little to complain about what is arguably the best-constructed team in all IPL, which means they will definitely lose to CSK.

Chennai Super Kings:

The oldest truism of IPL is that nine teams compete to find out who will lose to CSK in the finals. Dhoni is essentially a non-playing captain of the Darren Sammy vintage, but to be honest, he warrants a place in the side for just DRS calls and leadership. This is an assertion with a control group, when Jadeja was made captain and he had the exact same squad, the franchise started losing spectacularly, for which they had to bring Dhoni.

Dhoni works miracles—he can make Rahane bat like Chris Gayle, rescues Shivam Dube from the scrapheap of abandoned talent after underwhelming returns for RCB, between the talent of Ruturaj Gaikwad and Jagadeesan, who they bought the same year, chooses the right guy and lets the wrong guy go (where he was picked up KKR of course). This is why the return of Shardul Thakur, from KKR of course, is a canny move—CSK buys low and sells high, unlike, well, KKR, which does the exact opposite. Most other sides would be gutted by the withdrawal of Conway and Pathirana, but under Dhoni, they barely register as blips, given the amount of backup that exists.

One thing you will notice is that CSK, once the Dad’s Army is no longer that, Dhoni has steadily moved the needle to young talent, and their acquisition of Sameer Rizvi was done keeping in mind the retentions for next year’s mega-auctions. With Devon Conway out, I believe Ruturaj opens with Ravindra, followed by Rahane, Moeen, Mitchell, Dube, Jadeja, and Thakur (Sameer Rizvi being an excellent impact player), and that is a great line-up with three all-rounders (Ravindra, Moeen, and Jadeja), followed by Deepak Chahar, and the opportunity of playing Mustafizur on slow Chnennai pitches, this is the kind of XI Dhoni loves, of multi-function players, who he can juggle at will, based on match situations and pitch conditions.

Under Dhoni, CSK has destroyed democracy in IPL, as India’s most loved Youtuber will tell you.

Kolkata Knight Riders:

Let’s get the good out of the way first. The core Indian core of potential first XI T20 players is solid for KKR—Nitish Rana, Venkatesh Iyer, Shreyas Iyer, and the legendary Rinku Singh, Not bad, not bad at all for a side used to Akash Chopra as a pinch-hitter, Ajit Agarkar as the economy bowler and Tatendra Taibu as the backup. Add to that Indian core, Varun Chakravorty and Suyash, and again, pretty, pretty good.

The rest though is the effect of a lifetime of shocking decisions at the auction table and during retentions, thanks to the “brain” trust that has run the franchise. KKR has two major problems: lack of death bowling, which is why it is the franchise that has leaked the most runs at the end, and the lack of backup options for their first XI, which is even more important for the franchise, as they carry two permanently injured super-stars: Shreyas Iyer and Andre Russell. They had the opportunity to solve both coming into the auction in 2024, but Pandit seemed more focused on the snacks that were on offer, and Gambhir on scowling down at everyone at the table. They could have bought steady backups, but once they lost Powell to Royals (they were starting off in the right direction), they stopped looking for the kind of foreign bowling talent they needed to create a bank of pace-bowling options.

Instead, in a moment of grand circus, they blew their entire purse on Mitchell Starc. Starc treats the IPL as a circus (his own words), which, in his defense, might have sprung to mind after meeting the clown posse that constitutes its management. If that is not a peek into how seriously he takes the tournament, Starc is unlikely to last the entire season. He so much as gets a pebble in his shoe or sees one of the paintings of Bengal’s greatest living Renaissance figure, that he will cite physical and mental fatigue, cash in whatever amount he has already earned, and go back to Australia. Even more importantly, Starc has had pretty underwhelming death-bowling returns in the last few years for Australia.

So to sum up, KKR spent a huge amount of money on one fragile player with a highly suspect commitment, to add to their gallery of expensive Ming vases, and ended up solving none of their problems. Pretty much par for the course for the franchise that gave away Gill, that too while belonging to a fish-eating state, while retaining Russell, because he plays for their other franchises, and also Venkatesh Iyer, after half a season’s worth of performance. This time too, Kolkata has gone all-in on retro-nostalgia: Manish Pandey and Yusuf Pathan from their championship-winning side, one to sit on the bench and tell Gambhir he should have been given all credit for the World Cup 2011 final win, and the other to wrest from Congress one of their only safe seats in the state.

Much of Kolkata’s fortunes will depend on the pitch at the Eden. Because the Cricket Association of Bengal has never seen eye-to-eye with the franchise, thanks possibly to the bad blood from the Dada days, the Eden pitch has become a clone of Chinnaswamy, with a focus on pace. This is exactly Knight Rider’s weak spot, a fact evidenced by them winning only two out of the seven games they played at their home venue, with the bowlers as friendly to the batsmen as Koel Poorie is to the ruling party.

If Gambhir can remove the grass and crack the pitch by the force of his angry glare, and bring it back to the slow, low turner of 2014, then yes, Knight Riders has a chance. They were lucky too, in that with Roy withdrawing, they got Salt, who I believe they should have bought at the auctions itself, given their lack of keeping options. Their seam bowling is not much better than RCB, and if the Eden is not a low turner, consistently post 180 plus scores have to be scored to be even competitive.

Much is made of the fact that Gambhir is back, but he still carries “Modiji ki parivar” on his Twitter profile in deep TMC country, and this summarizes the state of the franchise, its internal inconsistencies, lack of thinking, and a continuous taking for granted of its passionate fan-base.

I so do wish it wins IPL this time, but life unfortunately isn’t Zee Cine Awards for SRK movies to sweep all awards. And so I am left to reconcile myself to the cosmic joke of having the same franchise own the two cities of my residence—Kolkata and Los Angeles and to always be on the side that gnashes its teeth in anger