What has happened to the Renegades?

The Renegades are currently firmly at the foot of the Big Bash table, the position in which they also finished last year’s competition. This is a far cry from the 2018/19 competition where they finished 2nd in the league stage and then went on to win the tournament. So what has prompted this fall in grace?

We can examine this by breaking down their wins into Bating Wins Above Average (Bat WAA) per innings and Bowling Wins Above Average (Bowl WAA) per innings. (For more details see here)

The chart shows that in their 2018/19 title-winning season they batted slightly below average but bowled very well. Since then, their batting performances have stayed fairly constant, but their bowling has gone from very good to terrible over the past two years. What explains this drop off in bowling performance?

We can see that in 2018/19 every bowler was average or better, with Harry Gurney really standing out as the star performer. His WAA per inning score of 0.086 means that, on average, when he bowled he increased the Renegades chances of winning by 8.6 percentage points, compared to an average bowler. In fact, he had the 2nd highest Bowl WAA per innings of any bowler in the competition (a certain spin bowler from Afghanistan was #1. Surprise surprise!) So what happened in 2019/20…?

By and large it was the same bowlers performing worse. (Gurney’s replacement Gleeson did not have the best of tournaments, but as the table shows, no one apart from Samit Patel performed well)

And what about this season? Kane Richardson and Mohammad Nabi have bounced back to his 2018/19 level. Imad Wasim and Jack Prestwidge have performed ably but other bowlers have struggled (Sutherland’s -35.1 figure is largely driven by his 1–57 that contributed to a very unlikely win for the Sixers)

So will the Renegades bounce back next season (even if they keep the same set of players)? The answer is probably, yes, they will probably win more games than this season. There is a large chunk of bad luck involved for any team who finds themselves bottom of the table (vice-versa for top of the table). Hatzoglou, Noor Ahmad and Sutherland are young bowlers who are probably not as bad as these figures suggest and Lalor has proven over his career that he can hold his own. But just how well is anybody’s guess! (Although for an informed guess come back here to read future work how predictive past performance is of future performance…)