IPL MVPI: Shane Watson zooms to the top

Guess who is 2, 3 and 4?
Srinivas Bhogle and Purnendu Maji present the best performing players in IPL-11 in Rediff.com's Most Valuable Players ratings.

Shane Watson's third IPL century on Friday, April 20, night did not just facilitate a big Chennai Super Kings victory; it also sent him soaring to the top of the Most Valuable Player Index table.

With an MVPI of 322, and with the second-placed Sunil Narine having an MVPI of 265, Watson is likely to stay on top for a while.

So, what is MVPI, or the Most Valuable Player Index? We use it to measure the best performances in T20 (or ODI) matches.

To have the best MVPI, players must score a lot of runs at high strike rates, and also take a lot of wickets at low economy rates. More catches and run outs help even more.

MVPI thus collapses every player's batting, bowling and fielding performance into a single 'run equivalent'.

All-rounders like Watson are best-placed to top the MVPI tables, because they can score 'runs', both as batsmen and bowlers.

Watson hasn't just scored 175 runs at a blazing strike rate of 177. He has also taken 6 wickets at a better-than-par economy rate of 7.4.

It, therefore, isn't a surprise that the top four in the MVPI table -- Watson, Narine, Nitish Rana and Andre Russell are all-rounders.

Notice too that Chris Gayle has jumped to the seventh place after playing just 2 matches.

Give 'Universe Boss' a few more good games and he'll race to the top.

He has been there often enough in the past, and the surprise is that he is threatening to go up there again after so many years.

Table 1 provides all details.

Table 1: Best performing players so far at IPL-11

All data in our analysis is updated after the 17th match on April 20, 2018.