What makes a successful run chase in the IPL

A look at the way teams have been chasing targets in the IPL since 2019, and how 2024 was just a tad bit different in the way teams approach run chases.

T20 batting has two sides to it; the calculations of putting up a first-innings total that could be considered above par for the given conditions, and the complexities of structuring the second innings chase across the innings to bag a win safely towards the tee end of the game. While setting a first-innings total often relies on aggressive batting, chasing introduces strict constraints, demanding a more calculated approach. As an anchor, you must avoid playing recklessly. If you’re a pinch hitter, you can’t eat up too many deliveries. With a target run rate which, as is observed, that slowly creeps upwards and upwards as an innings progresses; chasing a total becomes a whole different ball game than defending one.

Today, we will be looking at successful IPL run chases from 2019-2024 to assess how teams structure the second innings to go over the line and have a look at how batters just things a tad bit differently in 2024.

Since 2019, 51.76% of the first-innings totals have been successfully chased down, with each season averaging between ~45-60% of successful chases, the highest being in 2021 where 61.7% of the chases resulted in success.

While the proportion of matches won chasing have largely stayed the same, the distribution of targets set and chased have varied dramatically between 2024 and the 5 seasons preceding it.

Between 2019 and 2023, almost 62% of the targets were set at below 180 runs, with ~42% of them being between 150 and 180 runs. Scores between 170-180 are what’s typically considered to be at par for most grounds across India, and the spread of targets have shown just that.

The number of targets less than 180 runs and between 150 & 180 runs fell to 44% and 30% respectively in the 2024 edition, with almost 40% of the chases requiring the team to go at more than 10 RPO (as compared to 18% in the last 5 seasons). This represents a significant shift in how teams approached batting in the 20-over format. The 2024 season was dominated by aggressive hitting at the top of the order, with Sunil Narine notching up his maiden ton, proving to be a crucial pinch-hitter in KKR’s winning campaign, both of SRH’s openers (T. Head and Abhishek Sharma) scoring ~500 runs at the SR of 191 and 204 each, and even Virat Kohli being slightly more aggressive than his usual self as he took the orange cap with the SR of 154, having been a career batter with a 137 SR in the league. But it wasn’t just the way teams set up their targets that it was aggressive, it was also the way they chased them down.

The graph above shows the scoring rate over the target run rate that teams have gone at in all successful chases since 2019. The figures denote the rate at which chasing team have gone - the target run rate at the beginning of the chase. So in 2019, at a PP run rate over target run rate of 0.86, teams scored 0.86 runs more on average over the target run rate in the first 6 overs of the chase. For example, a team would strike at 7.86 RPO in the first 6 overs in a chase of 140 runs (with a target RR of 7) in 2019.

What’s clearly observable here is that teams in successful chases have almost always tried to stay at par with the asking rate at the start of the innings by the end of the first 6 overs. If the target run rate is 9 RPO, and a team finds them having ticked the scoreboard to 53-55 after the PP (~almost a run rate of 9), they’ll find themselves to be in a comfortable position going forward in the run chase.

Himanish Ganjoo, in his piece for ESPN dated august of 2020, had studied successful IPL run chases above 140 runs from 2016-2020, and had come to the conclusion that successful chasing teams had racked up almost unanimously racked up 30% of the overall target runs in the first 30% of the allotted overs (overs 1-6). Basically, saying that going at par with the Target RR works. The trend of scoring at par with the initial asking rate was prevalent in the 5 years between 2019 and 2023 too, but 2024 saw something different.

In all the successful run chases in the 2024 edition of the IPL (36 out of the 71 completed matches, including the play-offs), teams, on an average went at 1.78 runs more than what was the target run rate at the beginning of the innings in the first 6 overs of the run chase. That's a staggering leap from 2023, where teams increased their scoring rate in the powerplay by just 0.46 runs per over. Chasing teams have, on an average, scored 1.78 runs more per over than what was asked of them at the beginning of the innings in 2024. Doing so allows them to stay in control of the chase and specifically take on the middle overs better (7-11), where teams generally tend to turn it down a notch.

To illustrate the advantage of exceeding the asking rate in the powerplay, let’s compare run chases from 2021 and 2024. In 2021, teams scored 0.94 runs per over above the Target Run Rate (TRR) during the powerplay—the highest in that 5-year period. This allowed them to chase 160 runs with a reduced required run rate of 7.59 per over for the remaining 14 overs (0.40 RPO below the TRR). In 2024, teams achieved an even higher rate of 1.78 RPO above the TRR in the powerplay. This aggressive start brought the required rate for the next 14 overs down to 7.23 per over—0.76 RPO lower than the TRR.

These comparisons highlight how maximizing powerplay scoring can significantly reduce pressure in the latter stages of a chase, providing teams with a strategic edge. An understandable question now is if this heightened aggression in the Powerplay came at the cost of more wickets than what’s usually observed, and the answer is no. On average, and this is a point Himanish discussed in his piece too, teams that have successfully chased down targets have lost 1 wicket in the powerplay, whereas in unsuccessful chases, they’ve found themselves to be at the loss of 2 wickets on average at the end of the first 6 overs.

Taking a more granular look at how run chases have been structured over the years gives us a better look at what exactly teams have done differently in the 2024 season.

This chart indicates clearly the way teams have gone about run chases differently in 2024. Between 2019 and 2023, teams have managed to stay almost at par in the powerplay, simmer down between overs 7-10 and then gradually accelerate thereon out till the 18th and 19th over before crossing the line at the end.

In 2024, however, teams have adopted a different strategy, particularly during the powerplay. The earlier stats already hint at this shift, and the graph underscores it. While there are fluctuations throughout the middle and later overs, teams have found ways to inject high-scoring bursts at critical moments, giving themselves a stronger position to chase down targets. They’ve gone on so well that on average, they’ve just had to go at par with the Target Run Rate in the tee end of the innings to bag a victory (that is, for run chases that have gone down to the wire in 2024 - SRH vs LSG circa May, 2024).

Dot ball % is a good metric to determine the methodology of a successful run chase. T20 cricket has been marked by the role of anchors since its inception. These are batters that absorb deliveries right off the bat, settling in, so that they can attack later in the game. The graph above where chasing teams have gone at comparatively quicker run rate shows their modus operandi. The 2024 season showed a change in the dot ball % by chasing batters across different phases of the innings. With the average target for completed matches in 2024 reaching 190 runs—the highest in the IPL's 17-year history—analyzing dot ball percentages in successfully chased games across years could lead to skewed conclusions. This is because higher targets generally result in a lower proportion of dot balls. To avoid bias, we'll focus on successful chases with targets in the range of 150 to 180 runs and compare the dot ball percentages between 2019-2023 and 2024.

As can be seen above, it wasn’t just the sky-high average target that prompted opening batters to go about more aggressively. In games with successfully chased targets between 150 and 180, an average of 41.5% of the deliveries were bowled without a run against them in 2019-2023, as compared to 37.8% in 2024. Teams stayed slightly above average in overs 7-11 and slightly below it in 12-15, before going above the 2019-2023 average dot ball percentage in the death overs of a chase. This directly correlates with the mean over-rate graphs where teams successfully chasing were able to simmer down a bit in the end, for all that was done in the first 15 overs. In a season where 36 out of 71 completed games were successfully chased—closely aligning with the league's historical average for successful chases—it wasn’t about teams winning more run chases in 2024. Instead, it was about how they went about achieving those wins.

Looking at boundary percentages across phases in successful run chases further supplements our hypothesis.

Keeping our constraint of looking at run chases between 150 and 180 fixed, teams have consistently hit more boundaries across different phases of a run-chase, with, again, a marked difference in the way the PP was approached with a 22.6% boundary percentage, as compared to 16.4% in the 5 years preceding that. In other words, teams chasing hit a boundary every 5 balls in the 2024 season, whereas a boundary was hit once in every 6 balls in seasons 2019-2023.

The comparatively toned-down approach in the death overs can be explained by the graph above. On average, only 21.3% of the target runs were left to be chased in the final 5 overs (25% of the innings over quota) in successful run-chases, second only to 2021 with 20.3%. Even in instances were teams batting second weren’t able to cross the line, the average runs remaining were 34.9%, which is the lowest that’s been observed since 2019.

What factors have enabled batters to approach run chases in this manner? What key elements have driven this shift? Given that the powerplay showed the most significant differences, I analyzed how batters tackled the most commonly used bowling option during this phase: pace bowling.

In successful run chases ranging between 150 and 180 runs, batters have struck at 165 in the powerplay against pace bowling (right-arm fast, left-arm fast, right-arm medium fast, and left-arm medium fast). The quickest they had gone at between 2019-2023 was in 2019, at 152. This has been a staggering jump since pace bowling strike rate has ranged between 130-140 for the past couple of years.

So yeah, they’ve struck at a quicker rate in the PP, that’s been made obvious with all that was said before, but what I particularly found interesting was the way the good length balls of pacers were played in the 2024 edition. Good length bowling has been the kryptonite for many, many batters’ strike rates in T20 cricket. It’s tough to score against, especially so in the powerplay with the new ball and movement off the deck, so batters in the Top 3 tend to defend and see off the threat. In 2024, top-order bats did marginally better at being more proactive towards good length pace bowling in the Powerplay, defending 11.7% of the good length balls on average, whereas the average between 2019-2023 for the same was 14.6%.

Similarly, we can examine how batters performed against different bowling styles during other phases of a run chase. Focusing on overs 7-11 and 12-15—typically when spin is introduced into the attack—we can analyze batting statistics against various types of spin bowling and determine if chasers in 2024 stood out.

After the powerplay, scoring rates tend to drop as batters become more risk-averse. During this phase, they focus on rotating the strike and playing cautiously, aiming to build a solid foundation before accelerating later in the innings.

Off-break bowlers like Narine, Ashwin, and Mujeeb Ur Rahman, who are frequently used in this phase, are known for their ability to contain the opposition’s hitting, effectively putting pressure on the chasing team and increasing their required run rate. In 2024, batters were able to maintain a SR of 141 against off-break bowlers between overs 7-11 in successful run chases above 150 runs, the highest across our years of study, alongside a healthy average of 72. A higher average typically comes with more conservative batting, but in 2024 batters tried to ramp up both of them and succeeded.

Successful chases in 2024 also saw batters take on leg-spin way more aggressively than what was observed previously, striking at almost 205 against them, whereas the mainstay average SR between 2019-2023 was ~140 (spinners were taken on at a SR of 183 in that phase of successful chases in 2023). However, leg-break wasn’t bowled as much in this phase for us to derive anything conclusively.

Raw data credits: T20 ball-by-ball data maintained by Himanish Ganjoo