Will the IPL 2025 see the first-ever 300-point score?

By
Jay Rock
-
20

Former RCB director of cricket Mike Hesson and KKR strategy consultant Nathan Leamon offer their thoughts on why it might occur this year.

Who will qualify for the postseason? Who are the front-runners? Will the seventh retire? Let’s set aside those often asked questions and pose a fresh one that relates to the 2025 Indian Premier League: Will it be the first time a team scores 300?

That may seem like clickbait, but given how frequently batting records were broken in the 2024 Indian Premier League, it is highly significant. Prior to the most recent season, the highest IPL total had not been reached since 2013. In 2024, RCB’s score of 263 for 5 against the Pune Warriors was surpassed four times. Eight of the 17 IPL seasons have seen 250-plus totals, with Sunrisers Hyderabad’s 287 for 3 against Royal Challengers Bengaluru last year serving as the new high point.

Against the Lucknow Super Giants, its openers Travis Head and Abhishek Sharma, better known as Travishek, hammered a target of 166 in 58 balls, or in 9.4 overs. These incredible batting achievements weren’t an anomaly. In IPL 2024, practically all batting metrics showed improvement.

In T20 cricket, the 300-peak has already been reached three times in men’s cricket and five times in women’s cricket. In a high-profile match involving teams of a particular caliber, it has just never been done. The Sunrisers threatened it twice in the previous IPL, and India got within three runs of 300 against Bangladesh last year.

Who could be able to breach the 300-barrier this season, and how?

When England reached the three highest totals in men’s ODI cricket, Nathan Leamon, their chief analyst, predicted that 300 would be reached. Since 2021, he has served as a strategy consultant with the reigning champion Kolkata Knight Riders, having watched the IPL change from the outside.

“Yes, absolutely,” Leamon tells ESPNcricinfo from Kolkata a few days before KKR take on RCB at Eden Gardens. “We have already seen a huge escalation in scores over the last two years. It would be naive to think that we have got to the fullest extent of that – of teams learning how to take advantage of the new laws. Although average scores have gone up, but it’s more the variance, the spread of scores has increased hugely. You have seen several games where 260 has been scored, which never used to happen. You have seen several games where teams score a 100 in the powerplay; I think there were one or two very famous instances of that happening in the whole history of T20 cricket before now. So something has changed.”

The Impact Player rule, which the IPL implemented in 2023, is the driving force behind record scores and turbocharged batting. The regulation, which offers teams more batting depth, has enabled batters to play at a high pace and place a lower price on their wicket, much like a performance-enhancing stimulant. According to Leamon, the regulation also encouraged teams to target aggressive hitters during the 2025–2027 cycle’s big auction. “What some teams realised was that you had to increase the aggression of your line-up all the way through if you are going to maximise the advantage of that extra batter.”

After batters no longer fear leaving the field, it becomes “dangerous” for bowlers and coaches, according to Mike Hesson, who served as RCB’s team director from 2020 to 2023. “If you remove the worry of getting out, it’s amazing what you can do,” Hesson asserts. And that’s the difficulty. There was always a compromise between “hey, we don’t want to lose more than one wicket or whatever,” which is why it used to be 52 or 54 and then 58 [par] in powerplay.

“Now that balance is gone because that’s your chance to get ahead of the game. And with the Impact rule, the reality is if you lose an extra wicket, it doesn’t matter. If there’s someone at the long-on fence, I can assure you none of these guys are even concerned about that. You used to open the blade and try to hit it in the gap. Now they just have it straight over their head.”

The increase in aggressive batting from 2023 to 2024 is supported by data. Last season, the powerplay’s first-innings run rate increased by 2.49%. The death overs (17–20) saw a 3.62% increase in run rate, while the middle overs (7–16) saw the biggest increase (5.77%). In 2024, there is a notable rise in first-innings run rates compared to 2022, the season prior to the implementation of the Impact Player rule: 10.8%.

“Let’s go back to the old days,” Leamon says. “One-hundred-sixty is an average score in T20. Let’s say that if you batted more aggressively with the same resources, maybe you would have moved the average score up to 165. But with the traditional approach, your average is 160, and let’s say that 90% of scores are then going to fall between 120 and 200.
“Now what you get with that increased aggression is, if it comes off you can access much, much higher scores and if it fails, it fails dramatically. So you go more aggressive, you move your average total to 165, but that spread of scores, which encompasses 90% of the totals that you score batting that way then goes up to 220 and down to 110. So your lower scores would be lower if you are more aggressive and your highest scores will be higher even if the average doesn’t move. And if the average moves as well, then you have this compounding effect. And by being more aggressive, you not only raise the average, but you also increase the spread of scores in terms of the total.”