IPL 2026: When the dust settles …

Over the last two and a half months, at IPL 2026 ‘pitch’ed battles happened daily between rival IPL teams, all across the grounds of India. With IPL 2026 done and dusted, and the dust settling down one name has been indelibly etched in the minds of cricketing fans all over the world, and that is Vaibhav Suryavanshi. Suryavanshi is the new kid on the block, the teenage sensation who has captured the imagination of everybody with his superlative performances with the bat. In every match, Suryavanshi treated seasoned and veteran bowlers with utter disdain and scant respect, and dispatched deliveries of Pat Cummins, Josh Hazzlewood, Rabada, Bumrah etc. to the boundary

To a large extent, this post is a tribute to Vaibhav Suryavanshi. I did not watch much of IPL 2026, much like many others, except for small snatches of the game when Suryavanshi came in to bat. It was definitely a treat to watch him go at all the bowlers right from the get-go!

Though I did not spend much time on IPL 2026, my data pipeline for my application IPL AI Oracle was kept current daily. To know more about the application IPL AI Oracle see IPL AI Oracle 2026 is now live!! The data pipeline that I had built completed all the necessary steps every morning, at scheduled times starting with:

downloading the data
unzipping them
pre-processing the data
pushing it in the appropriate folders
creating the necessary ML features
pushing the dataset to Kaggle
kicking off the Deep Learning algorithm
polling periodically for the Deep Learning algorithm completion
Downloading the model weights and metadata from Kaggle

and finally pushing all the data with all the changes and ML model weights to Railway and Vercel for consumption by IPL AI Oracle Application.

A) IPL AI Oracle

a) Batting scorecard

b) Match Worm Chart

c) Win Probability (Side by Side)

d) How many sixes did Suryavanshi hit? (Natural Language Query)

e) What is Suryavanshi’s strike rate in IPL 2026?

B) GooglyPlusPlus 2024

The data that I had processed using my data pipeline for IPL AI Oracle can also be used for the GooglyPlusPlus 2024, the application the R Shiny application I had created about two years back. To know more about my shiny application, GooglyPlusPlus see IPL 2023:GooglyPlusPlus now with by AI/ML models, near real-time analytics! My Shiny application GooglyPluslus 2024 has certain charts which are not currently available in my current application IPL AI Oracle, so I have generated this analysis of Suryavanshi using GooglyPlusPlus

Here are some interesting charts showing the performance of Suryavanshi in IPL 2026

a) IPL Batsmen Rank 2026 (Runs over Strike Rate)

b) IPL Batsmen Rank 2026 (Strike Rate over Runs)

c) Overall Runs vs Strike Rate plot in IPL 2026

Clearly, Praganada’s runs and strike rate are a breakaway from the ordinary milieu of the other batsmen in IPL 2026.

d) Overall Runs vs Strike rate in Power play in IPL 2026

Even in the Power Play, Suryavanshi leads Abhishek Sharma and Virat Kohli and Travis Head etc

e) Batsman Runs vs Strike Rate plot ( V Suryavanshi)

f) Batsman Cumulative Average Runs ( V Suryavanshi)

g) Batsman Cumulative Strike Rate (V Suryavanshi)

h) Batsman Runs vs Opposition (V Suryavanshi)

i) Predict runs for batsman (V Suryavanshi)

On an average, Suryavanshi would score 42 runs in 24 deliveries, and for greater than 24 deliveries his predicted runs would average around 82.

While Suryavanshi has had a stellar performance in IPL, it needs to be seen how he performs on seaming and swinging grounds across the world. His first international tour, the UK tour, is going to be a real test of his skill and timing. It needs to be seen how he negotiates the swinging deliveries, specifically in the grounds in England, and if he can perform with equal aggressiveness at these grounds, he would be among the top T20 batsmen of all time in the times to come.

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