ASHFAQ-UL-ALAM

“There are three kinds of lies: lies, damned lies, and statistics,” is a famous quote from American author and humourist Mark Twain that alludes to the concealing nature of statistics.

Twain argued, that despite being based on concrete numbers, statistics often doesn’t portray the full picture and leaves out more than it reveals.

This assessment of his holds true when looking at the run-getters statistics of the recently concluded 10th Bangladesh Premier League (BPL), where the local players have topped the charts in an apparent proof of their improved pedigree in the shortest format. Upon further inspection, however, this belief simply falls apart.

This BPL season, the top five run-getters were all local players, with champions Fortune Barishal’s captain Tamim Iqbal at the lead with 492 runs, followed by Towhid Hridoy (462), Liton Das (391), Tanzid Hasan (384) and Mushfiqur Rahim (380).

In the bowler’s list, the top three wicket-takers are all from Bangladesh as well -- Shoriful Islam (22), Shakib Al Hasan (17) and Mahedi Hasan (16) – ahead of Mohammad Saifuddin and Chattogram Challengers’ Oman pacer Bilal Khan, both tied at 15 wickets each.

Interestingly, the makeup of the top five run-scorers and wicket-takers was the same in the last season as well, with no foreign player in the batters’ list and only one overseas recruit in the bowlers’ one.

In the four seasons before that, local bowlers usually took up most of the spots in the top five wicket-takers’ list, which didn’t come as a surprise, considering how adept the local spinners are at bowling on the typical low and slow Bangladeshi tracks. But in the batters list, the foreigners always dominated, with an overseas batter finishing as the highest run-getter in all four of those editions – Will Jacks (2022), Rilee Rossouw (2020, 2019) and Chris Gayle (2017).

The trend of overseas batters’ dominance ended last season – the same year when two other money-spinning leagues began taking place roughly in the same window as the BPL.

South Africa’s SA20 and the UAE’s ILT20 held their inaugural editions last year and most top T20 specialists of the world snubbed the BPL to turn up in the new leagues. Top international players flying in for a handful of games is nothing new in BPL. But since last season, this tendency has gone into overdrive.

Players like Rangpur Rider’s Pakistan’s Babar Azam and New Zealand’s Jimmy Neesham played only six and seven matches, respectively, this season but left their mark in the short period, having scored 251 and 291 runs, respectively. In addition, Barishal’s Kyle Mayers made 243 runs in six games.

All three of them could’ve potentially been in the running to become the highest run-getter had they played the entire tournament. The fallacy of local batters’ dominance becomes even more apparent when looking at averages’ list.

Among batters who have scored at least 200 runs, Neesham has the highest average among all, 72.75, followed by Benny Howell (57.25), Babar (50.2), Tom Bruce (46.33) and Mayers (40.5).

Comilla Victorians local batter Jaker Ali narrowly missed out on this list as although he averages 99.5, he has scored 199 runs in his 10 innings.

In terms of strike-rate among batters with a minimum of 100 runs, Andre Russell (205.66) leads the list followed by Neesham (167.24), Jacks (165.26), Evin Lewis (162.99) and Avishka Fernando (159.63), which indicates that teams are mostly depending on foreign players for quick runs.

The dominance of Bangladeshi batters is likely to continue in upcoming seasons as BPL will continue to clash with the other two leagues, further inflating a false sense of progress which will most likely get deflated in the international arena.