The Indian Premier League - or IPL - is the premier T20 cricket tournament in the world. It's played in India but features Indian as well as foreign players though each team is limited to 4 foreign players in the playing 11. Let's take a look at some IPL data. The source of the the data is from
Data World. The data lists every match, the opponents, the venue, who won the toss, what they decided to when they won the toss and then who won and both how much by and if they won by wickets (chasing) or by runs (defending). All matches from 2008 through 2017 are included.
10 seasons is a decent amount of data to look at. Here are some questions we will look to answer:
- Which are the most dominant teams?
- How impactful is winning the toss?
- Do teams prefer to bat first or field first?
- How close are these games really?
Overall, the data set has information on 637 matches. Some teams are regulars like the Mumbai Indians or the Delhi Daredevils or the Kolkata Knight Riders that have played every single season. Some others such as the Gujarat Lions or the Kochi Tuskers Kerala or Pune (Warriors and Rising Supergiants) have had only one or two or three seasons. Then of course a powerhouse team like Chennai Super Kings has played every year but had to skip the 2016 and 2017 season due to scandal. In other words the data is not exactly uniform and consistent across all teams but real world data rarely is!