IPL teams and the formation 4-3-2-2

It certainly isn't soccer but no less than that. Every team in IPL has to look at all the pieces and play the puzzle to the best. And guess what, the team that has the best formation looks, at least on paper, set to go.

IPL3 has seen the likes of Mumbai and Bangalore set the tempo. Though a bit inconsistent, Delhi seems to have found the momentum at the right time. Being someone interested in numbers, I was wondering what thoughts went through the franchisees and the coaches before getting to the field.

Coming to the formation...it is common knowledge that you can have only 4 foreigners in your team. Every franchise has loads of foreigners to fill this and in fact, abundant riches to fill this quota. Next come the 7 slots for Indians. More or less, each franchise has 2-3 Indian players and 2-3 upcoming stars. This leaves us with 2 slots for the unknowns or the players in wilderness.

This means the sector combo of the rising stars plus the local unknowns make up the important chunk for the teams to perform. If you look at the various teams and have a look at this segment you would find that this is what differentiates the teams:

Chennai: Jakati, Tyagi, Badrinath, Gony, Parthiv, Ganapathy, Joginder Sharma

Bangalore: Manish Pandey, Vinay Kumar, Praveen Kumar, Uthappa, KP Appanna, Mithun

Hyderabad: RP Singh, Mohnish Mishra, Suman, Venugopala rao, Jaskaran, Anirudh Singh, Rahul Sharma

Mumbai: Rayudu, Tiwary, Dhawan, Sathish, Murtaza, Tare, Nayar

Rajasthan: Trivedi, Naman Ojha, Munaf Patel, Jhunjunwala, Dogra, Raut, Narwal

Punjab: Piyush Chawla, Bisla, Kaif, Shrivastav, Powar, Sodhi, VS Malik, Luv Ablish

Delhi: Mishra, Sangwan, Umesh Yadav, Dheeraj Jadhav, Mithun Manhas, Rajat Bhatia, Ladda

Kolkata: Monoj Tiwary, Saha, Pujara, Agarkar, Kartik, Shukla, Vignesh, Iqbal Abdullah, Parmar

If you see the trend, the teams that are doing well (Mumbai, Bangalore, Delhi) have some deep pockets of reserves. And more so, the players in the differentiating pool have performed admirably well for them. If you look at the teams vying for the wooden spoon or the ones struggling for consistency, you find that the pool itself is inconsistent.

No wonder, Sachin insisted on investing in Indian youngsters in IPL2. Mumbai are reaping good benefits already. Interesting to see if this pays off till the end!