For the first time in the T20 Champions League's rich, three-year-old history, a team that didn't win its domestic competition has been crowned the champion of champions. Just in case you doubt the accuracy of that fact, I've compiled a list of all the winners. Please take your time to go through it, however long and tedious it may seem.
Year
|
CLT20 Champions
|
Domestic Champions
|
2009
|
New
South Wales
|
Yes
|
2010
|
Chennai
Super Kings
|
Yes
|
2011
|
Mumbai
Indians
|
No
|
Sarcasm aside, this is actually a half-decent achievement for the Indians (Mumbai Indians, that is... I will never get over how stupid a name that is for the franchise). I would have taken any sort of win after, you know, that series. A pretty exciting CLT20 was exactly the sort of thing most Indian (Team India, not Mumbai) fans needed after being battered in Tests and ODIs. In fact, I'd go as far as to say that it was... actually, I'm not going to say it at all, I'll have someone do it for me.
Thanks, Cliche Correspondent Ravi Shastri.
Nope, not until you've perfected faking laryngitis. (terrible execution of dark humor here)
Anyway, it was a good tournament, mostly because I only tuned in towards the latter stages - my first game was RCB's record chase. It's quite the underdog story for Mumbai, actually, once all the talk about flouting the rules or whatever has been extinguished. No, Somerset, you weren't the underdogs, because you really should have been the favorites to beat Mumbai. I know it's a hard pill to swallow, but you've gotta accept that, despite having a well settled team, you really did lose to an IPL side missing half its regular XI.
The India-England ODI's are a few days away, which is another post for another day. I'll leave you with some stats relating to Mumbai's CLT20 performance.
- Mumbai took the idea of T20 being a batsman's game, and bitchslapped it into unconsciousness. Their highest run scorer was Kieron Pollard, who scored 123 runs at 20.5, just over one-third the number of runs scored by David Warner, the top-scorer (328).
- Pollard also scored one of Mumbai's two fifties, the other one coming from Aiden Blizzard.
- Among those who actually made runs, Lasith Malinga had the second-highest strike rate (183.78) in the CLT20, with the highest being Kevon Cooper's 191.17.
- Lasith Malinga made exactly as many runs (68) as Yusuf Pathan and Suresh Raina, in the same number of innings.
- Mumbai's bowling stats, on the other hand, are pretty impressive. Malinga (10) and Abu Nechim Ahmed (8) are both among the top five wicket takers, and Harbhajan (7) sits just outside that.
- In that top five wicket takers' list, though, Malinga (20) and Ahmed (17.4) are the only ones not to bowl 24 overs.
- This has nothing to do with Mumbai, but Trinidad's spin duo of Badree and Narine have a combined economy rate of 4.46 rpo in the 48 overs they bowled. Wow.
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