Faulkner leads bowling performances

Chris Gayle has set the bar so high in IPL 2013 that it's highly unlikely that anyone will surpass his batting performance against Pune Warriors, but James Faulkner's 5 for 20 against Sunrisers Hyderabad has moved to the top of the list of bowling performances this season.

Faulkner's Man-of-the-Match performance was largely responsible for reducing Sunrisers to 19 for 5, and 29 for 6, though they later recovered to post 144. Faulkner's wickets included Shikhar Dhawan, Kumar Sangakkara, and Darren Sammy, who top scored with 60. That performance has pushed down Jacques Kallis' 3 for 13, against the same opposition, into second place.

Faulkner appears twice in the top six, the second time for his spell of 3 for 20 in a high-scoring game against Chennai Super Kings. That effort came in a losing cause, as Super Kings chased down 186, but Faulkner's effort stood out: he dismissed Suresh Raina, MS Dhoni and Ravindra Jadeja, and went at five an over in a match in which the average rate was 9.25.

One spot higher than him is Sunil Narine, for his 3 for 17, in a losing cause again, against Mumbai Indians. After Kolkata Knight Riders scored 159, Narine removed Sachin Tendulkar, Dwayne Smith and Rohit Sharma, and went at only 4.25 runs per over, the most economical figures of the match. Narine makes a second appearance too, at No.9, for his figures of 4 for 13 in the first match of the tournament, against Delhi Daredevils. That, though, was a low-scoring match: Daredevils were bowled out for 128 batting first, and two of Narine's victims were the No.8 and No.10 batsmen.

Among the other bowlers who've consistently impressed is Super Kings' Mohit Sharma, who has regularly bowled four tight overs with the new ball. Mohit has two top 15 performances: his 3 for 10 sunk Daredevils, and included Virender Sehwag and David Warner as his victims, while he was as impressive against Pune Warriors, dismissing Aaron Finch and Yuvraj Singh en route to figures of 3 for 21.

While Gayle's 175 stays the best by some distance, a few other performances over the last couple of weeks have moved into the top positions. Shane Watson's unbeaten 98 off 53 balls against Sunrisers is in second place: his knock helped Rajasthan Royals seal an emphatic victory, as they chased down 145 with more than two overs to spare.

The first sub-50 score is at No.4, and it belongs, quite fittingly, to MS Dhoni: his 45 against Pune Warriors came off a mere 16 balls, and it helped boost what had seemed like an average score into a matchwinning one. Dhoni played only 13% of the total deliveries in the innings, and scored 27% of the runs.

Suresh Raina's 100 not out against Kings XI, his first in an IPL game, is at No.5. Raina's strike rate was 188, but it came in a high-scoring game, with the average match run-rate being 8.9 runs per over.

Rohit Sharma's first appearance is at No.9, for his 39-ball unbeaten 79 against Kings XI, again. That too was a high-scoring game, with both teams touching 170, but Rohit's strike rate of 202 was by far the highest for his team, with the next-best being Dinesh Karthik's 131.

The next two knocks after Rohit's are from the same game, with the winning performance just pipping the losing one. Shane Watson scored 101 off 61, but Michael Hussey's 88 off 51 ended up as the winning performance, as Super Kings chased down 186 with a ball to spare.