PSL Chronicles #4: How Luke Ronchi Rocked the PSL
What do the numbers say about how Ronchi rocked the PSL during his time?
Ever since the inception of the Pakistan Super League (PSL), there has been one thing Islamabad United has always been known for: recruiting hard-hitting openers.
Shane Watson, Sharjeel Khan, Alex Hales, Colin Munro, and Paul Stirling are a few names that come to mind that United has signed over the years.
All of them have found vast success in their time playing for United (with Hales, Munro, and Stirling still representing the franchise), but it’s probably not as vast as one signing of United’s not too long ago, quite literally taking the league and fans by storm.
And that signing was Luke Ronchi.
Along with having the reputation for being a destructive opener, he also fit the bill for the formula United had evidently been following for the first 3 seasons: being an experienced campaigner.
Akin to the Chennai Super Kings in the Indian Premier League (IPL), in the early days of the PSL, Islamabad United were more or less their counterpart, primarily focusing on signing players who had loads of T20 games under their belt, which meant they would have the highest average player age heading into the season.
Ronchi was close to turning 37 when he was drafted by United in the Diamond category ($70K-$85K USD), but the sort of PSL career he would end up having would give weightage to a sentiment often echoed by quite a lot of Pakistan cricket fans: you can’t ever go wrong with experience.
So what do the numbers tell us about what his recipe for success was?
As can be seen throughout his PSL career, Ronchi’s modus operandi was always to bat aggressively irrespective of how frequently the subsequent success was yielded; the ideal T20 batting mindset as you’ve likely seen me tweet many times.
This can be seen in how his average form PSL3 dropped from a mammoth 43.50 to only 29 odd the following season.
The strike rate also sees a noticeable drop from 182.01 (highest in PSL3) to 155.61 (2nd highest). While all of this can be attributed to the regression to the mean phenomenon to a certain extent, Ronchi’s intent of “go big or go home” is still well-reflected.
As a result, in spite of Ronchi only playing 3 PSL seasons and that too from 2018-2020, he is still well up there using these metrics for an all-time span.
Ronchi finds himself sitting at #7 in this list of 63 batsmen.
The players above him are Paul Stirling, Chris Lynn, Sunil Narine, Liam Livingstone, Mohammad Haris, and Rahmanullah Gurbaz. All of them have played either only a season or two, so it is very likely that they too would experience a regression to the mean should all of these players play more PSL seasons, giving Ronchi the strong possibility of eventually being the topper of this list.
But what helped make it possible for Ronchi to achieve such numbers in the first place?
As can be seen, a big reason for Ronchi’s success in the PSL has been how good he was at dominating pace, and that too left-arm fast bowlers.
Express pace has always been the USP of the PSL. Both fans and the league have always prided themselves on the amount of 140+ pacers who emerge locally each season, and how pure the raw ingredients are that are yet to be refined to develop them further.
Foreign players (particularly the batsmen) have always been impressed by the fact that most PSL franchises are stacked with at least 2-3 local express pacers, as impressed when they are star-struck the first time trying a dish that isn’t just seasoned by salt and pepper. In many cases, back home in their domestic circuit, it’s very rare to see even one express pacer with the raw ingredients at the U23 level that is even remotely good enough to already play in their domestic league.
And that too one that is left-arm.
In the cases of many foreign batsmen, it’s been what makes or breaks their time at the Pakistan Super League. How good they are at handling the heat of these 140+ express raw pacers often dictates whether they are worthy of being retained for the next season, or to be redrafted again. Or perhaps if said players would want to even return again and play.
But Ronchi bossed both left-arm and right-arm fast bowlers throughout his PSL career.
As seen in both graphs, there is a massive disparity between the best and the second-best batsman against said bowlers in terms of strike rate.
In PSL3, the difference between Ronchi (196.15 SR) and Brendon McCullum was a whopping 72.47 (123.68 SR) while the following season, with Fakhar Zaman, it was 29.87 (142.86 SR), while Ronchi struck at 172.73.
Ronchi’s dominance of express pace was also reflective of how high his impact would be each season in turn.
He was at top of the list in both Cricinfo’s Most Valuable Player (MVP) list in PSL3, and their Impact Runs list
The following season, Ronchi was #6 in Cricinfo’s Most Valuable Player (MVP) list that season, while he stood at #3 in the Impact Runs list, and in his final season, #29 and #14 respectively.
At the end of his PSL career, Ronchi scored 1020 runs averaging 36.4 striking at 166.1, with 10 fifties and a top score of 94.
In a country that wants its batsmen to adopt an aggressive brand of T20 cricket yet discourages it after a single failure (inevitable at that given the volatile nature of both the format and playing with such a mindset), Luke Ronchi showed the possibilities of what can be achieved playing the way he did when you trade-off several inevitable failures for high impact innings, which is something Pakistan themselves even did so once upon a time to win the 2009 T20 World Cup, well before it became the norm it is today.
And that, mere dosto, is how Luke Ronchi Rocked the PSL.
One of the lines which you used here: He just played from 2018-20. But, he became a PSL star.
What a story, by stats. I actually thought he would have been since '17, after Haddin's retirement. Surely one of the best batters in the PP. M Haris and Gurbaz going into the same mold, it seems. But bossing left arm seamers by a RHB is not a joke at SR over 160.