Babar Azam finished his stint with the Rangpur Riders at the 2024 Bangladesh Premier League on February 6, amassing 251 runs from six matches at a strike rate of 114.61 and leaving the league as the top run-scorer 21 games into the season.
Following the controversy surrounding the issuance of NOCs to Pakistani players in the league, Babar was given permission by the PCB to participate in the tournament and made an immediate impact.
Babar started the first match of the season and scored 50 runs, securing a low run chase of 121 against Sylhet Strikers on the difficult Mirpur surface. With 39 wins and 6 losses, Rampur looked down and Babar forged an unbeaten 86-run partnership with Azmatullah Omarzai to guide his team to victory.
The next match ended in a disappointing run chase of 161 on 2 off 8 balls. Rangpur lost the game by 28 points.
After two matches of the season, Babar’s score was 58 off 57 balls. RecentlyPakistan moved him back to number three in the T20I teamwith the aim of giving him a faster start than the Rizwan-Babar pair usually provides. In his first two matches of BPL 2024, his strike rate was just below the run-a-ball, and doubts about Babar’s qualifications as a T20 batsman once again grew louder.
Run scoring was never a problem for the former Pakistan captain, even in the shortest format. He is on the verge of reaching his 10,000 T20 runs at a ridiculous average of 43.72. No one in the history of this format has scored more points with a higher average.
Therefore, it was no surprise that in the second match of BPL 2024, after a rare blip, Babar bounced back with four consecutive scores of 35+, including a half-century. Babar, who will leave Bangladesh after the match between Rangpur and Duronto Dhaka on February 6, finished the season with an average of 50.2 points. However, it was his accuracy rate of 114.6 that caught my eye again.
Until Babar’s last appearance, no one among the top 10 scorers in the league was scoring slower than him. Only one person remained in the top 15. Babar’s just two sixes in six games was also the lowest among the top 20 scorers before his departure.
The Bangladesh Premier League is different gravy
Babar’s BPL 2024 campaign may not have been a great spectacle for those who watch T20s just to watch the ball fly over the boundary. Can’t blame them. Because that’s also what the format was designed for. However, appearances in cricket do not necessarily correlate with effectiveness.
The Bangladesh Premier League is different from other T20 franchise tournaments. The pitches here are usually low and slow, making it a nightmare for batters to hit a ball over the line. Add to that the endless production line of finger spinners in Bangladesh’s system, who usually score low and are not easy to hunt, making him a very different league from T20.
Among the major T20 leagues around the world, the Bangladesh Premier League has featured in the list of lowest scoring tournaments three times. At the time of writing, BPL 2024 was scoring at 7.05 runs per game (rpo). Only CPL 2013, BPL 2016, CPL 2020, BPL 2017 and IPL 2009 have a lower scoring rate.
This makes Babar’s approach clearer. Babar was a restraining force on a team where only one other batter averaged 30 RBIs and only one other batter averaged 50 RBIs. He brought stability, which is much more important in his BPL than in other franchise leagues around the world.
There is no better example of the effectiveness of Babar’s ‘slow’ batting than the fact that in all the five times in which Rampur scored 35 or more, he won, and the only time he failed to score was in a loss.
With 62 out of 46 points against Dhaka, Rampur ended up with 183 points, 79 more than the required points. His 37 out of 36 points gave his team the chance to lead Rampur to his 165 points in the finish. This is a par score in which he proved to be eight runs too many for Comilla.
Babar finished the season with two 47s, scoring 37 balls against Sylhet and 43 balls against Dhaka. In both cases, Rampur was the first to score over his 160, as Babar’s reliability allowed other middle-order batsmen to take the necessary risks.
With more than half of the tournament still left, Babar may soon be replaced as the top scorer. 251 runs at a strike rate of 114.6 in a T20 season will not make for comfortable reading in a few months’ time and will add to the list of arguments raised against his quality as a T20 batsman. right. However, it doesn’t belong there.
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