Are 'fresh' players more paisa vasool?

The two best players in the second season of the Indian Premier League -- Matthew Hayden and Adam Gilchrist -- haven't played competitive cricket for a year.

Four among IPL's five best players are coming in relatively 'fresh' and only AB de Villiers among them has had a full cricket season. Lasith Malinga is returning from injury, and Irfan Pathan isn't a regular in India's playing eleven in ODIs and Tests.

The table below lists IPL second season's top 30 players after the first 20 matches. Note that about 20 (*) of these top 30 players can be classified as 'fresh' or 'sufficiently fresh'. It will be interesting to remember that Sri Lankan players haven't played competitive cricket after the Lahore incident. So they too haven't had a surfeit of international cricket.

Now, lets have a look at the performance of players in the IPL, who have come in after a very crowded and strenuous cricket season.

If we look at this list 'bottom up', we find that some of the season's most successful players are struggling: Graeme Smith, Gautam Gambhir, Zaheer Khan, Jacques Kallis … and even Virender Sehwag, Mahendra Singh Dhoni and Yuvraj Singh! These players aren't even averaging 25 'runs' per match, and costing the franchise upwards of US $2500 for every run scored.

Finally, we will look at how the 30 most expensive players in the IPL are currently performing.

A look at the paisa vasool index (PVI) column suggests that Kevin Pietersen, Andrew Flintoff, Dhoni, Sourav Ganguly, Jacques Kallis, Robin Uthappa, Gautam Gambhir, Brendon McCullum, Manoj Tiwary, Albie Morkel and Tyron Henderson -- with a PVI exceeding 4000 -- are currently not good value for money, at least on the cricket field.

Srinivas Bhogle now works for TEOCO Software Pvt Ltd. This note is based on the detailed IPL1 analysis carried out by Purnendu Maji in 2008. The paisa vasool index uses a model developed by M J Manohar Rao and Rajeeva L Karandikar.