IPL 2019: Who will bowl the most dot balls this time?

IPL 2019: Who will bowl the most dot balls this time?

IPL Indian Premier League 2019 12 Rashid Khan Harbhajan Singh

T20 has, among other aspects, changed the way scorecards are displayed. The second column in the bowling chart, dedicated to maiden overs for years, has now made way for dot balls. A maiden over, after all, involves six dot balls – an extremely infrequent occurrence in IPL, or any T20.

Only 12 maidens were bowled in the 2018 edition, of which Lungi Ngidi had bowled 2. In fact, Praveen Kumar (14) and Irfan Pathan (10) are the only ones to have bowled 10 or more maidens.

As for dot balls, Harbhajan Singh has bowled the most in the history of the Indian Premier League, followed by Praveen Kumar – though Praveen has bowled them way more frequently. Here is a list of bowlers with 800 or more dot balls in IPL history.

Here is the complete list.

PlayersDotsBallsB/DD/spellEcon
Harbhajan Singh1,1283,0982.758.77.05
Praveen Kumar1,0752,5242.3510.27.72
Lasith Malinga1,0602,5582.419.96.86
Amit Mishra1,0272,8612.798.67.39
Piyush Chawla1,0202,0582.0211.97.71
Dale Steyn9782,5942.659.06.72
R Ashwin9682,2582.3310.36.73
Bhuvneshwar Kumar9562,2582.3610.27.15
Sunil Narine9552,2922.4010.06.53
Zaheer Khan8732,2002.529.57.58
Umesh Yadav8602,2532.629.28.32
Irfan Pathan8352,0432.459.87.77
Shane Watson8042,0292.529.57.93

However, more dots are definitely not a guarantee of economic bowling, for a bowler may have expensive overs despite bowling a maiden. As we shall see, in 2018, Mitchell McClenaghan (2.33 balls per dot) has a worse economy than Narine (2.67).

Here are the list of bowlers who had bowled most dot balls in the 2018 IPL.

Players2019
team
DotsBallsB/DD/
spell
Econ
Rashid KhanSRH1674082.449.86.73
Umesh YadavRCB1483192.1611.17.86
Sunil NarineKKR1373662.679.07.65
Jasprit BumrahMI1333242.449.96.88
Siddharth KaulSRH1313963.027.98.28
Yuzvendra ChahalRCB1283002.3410.27.26
Bhuvneshwar KumarSRH1242171.7513.77.66
Trent BoultDD1183162.689.08.84
Deepak ChaharCSK1172291.9612.37.28
Sandeep SharmaSRH1162642.2810.57.56
Andrew TyeKXIP1163362.908.38.00
Shardul ThakurCSK1132802.489.79.23
Piyush ChawlaKKR1102942.679.08.40
Mitchell McClenaghanMI1032402.3310.38.30

Do note that while Rashid leads the list, it is also because he has bowled a lot of balls. He bowls one every 2.44 balls, which is significantly more than Bhuvneshwar’s 1.75 or Chahar’s 1.96.

Other than these two, Umesh, Sandeep, McClenaghan, and Chahal have also bowled more than 10 dots in an average 4-over spell.