‌IPL 2025 Mega Auction Preview: Analyzing Punjab King’s Strategy

Far from Royal in the Powerplay

Prabhsimran emerged as the only saving grace with an average of 33.71 and struck at nearly 160 in the phase, his 148 balls faced making up a fifth of the team’s entire quota. The two other men trusted up the order were Jonny Bairstow and Shikhar Dhawan – the former registering a solitary 50+ score in 11 innings while the latter struck at 123.75 and announced his retirement at the end of the season. Punjab are spoilt for options as far as picking a partner for Prabhsimran is concerned, given the presence of Phil Salt, KL Rahul, Ishan Kishan, Jos Buttler, and Quinton de Kock amongst others in the auction pool.

The bowling with a shiny new Kookaburra was relatively better, albeit the two-pace nature of their home surface did help. Punjab had the third-best powerplay economy amongst the 10 teams and outperformed the league’s true average of 57 by three runs. However, they struggled for breakthroughs and managed the second least wickets in the phase, striking once only every 30 deliveries.

The three quicks also bowled nearly 30% of the Kings’ middle overs in 2024, where these individuals' struggles persisted. Nevertheless, given Arshdeep’s standing as one of India’s premier T20I pacers, his ability to swing the new ball, nail yorkers with an older one, and his IPL pedigree, the Punjab pacer can rest assured of a recall to the setup. While Rabada and Curran also stand a chance of being RTM’ed simply on the back of their oeuvre and reputation, there are much more tempting options in the market. The return of Mohammed Shami to extend his PBKS record of 58 wickets in three seasons is one, as is the option to buy a tall quick in the mould of Marco Jansen or express pacers such as a Lockie Ferguson that can potentially thrive on Mullanpur’s two-paced surface.

Middling Performance in the middle

That said, the ability to break partnerships remained an issue during the middle overs in Mullanpur. While the Punjab bowlers took 15 wickets in their five games at the venue, the visiting units combined for 19. But perhaps the concern can be ascribed more to how their batters performed. In IPL 2024, Punjab was the only team to lose over 50 wickets in the middle overs and averaged just 25.50 runs per dismissal. All the other nine teams had at least one batter that scored over 250 runs in this phase while the Kings’ top performer was Shashank Singh with 214 runs.

The youngster alongwith fellow retention Prabhsimran only faced a quarter of Punjab’s deliveries in the middle order while four other batters faced over 70 balls, namely Sam Curran, Jitesh Sharma, Jonny Bairstow, and Rilee Roussow. The latter was the only one to impress but regardless of his return, a marquee middle-over signing is inevitable. With three experienced captains available in the market who could excel in this role – Shreyas Iyer, Rishabh Pant, and KL Rahul – be prepared to watch that INR 110.50 crore purse dwindle at alarming rates.

The predicament birthed in the middle overs unsurprisingly carried over to the death as bowlers had to face 23% of Kings’ deliveries in the last four overs. If not for the bombastic pairing of Ashutosh Sharma and Shashank in this phase, where the duo faced a third of all the deliveries and struck at over 200 combined, the Kings’ record of fourth lowest death batting strike rate in IPL 2024 could have read much worse.

Things were brighter with the ball, majorly due to the efforts of one man Harshal Patel. The purple cap holder took an astounding 16 wickets in the last four overs and another 10 from Arshdeep meant Punjab’s overall tally read 48, miles clear of the next-best teams with 33 scalps. However, even such heroics were not enough to stem the flow of runs as Punjab registered the fifth-worst death bowling economy rate despite the favourable bowling conditions at home.