The Indian Premier League has become India’s Premier sporting event ever since its inaugural edition in 2008. It gave a cricket-mad country like India just what it needed, and the rest is history. Many legendary overseas and Indian players have graced the IPL with their presence, but only a few of them have gone on to establish themselves as the ‘Baap’ or the Godfather of cricket in the IPL. Here we shall take a look at who those players are.
Virat Kohli: The Baap of Batting
The former India and RCB captain Virat Kohli sits at the top of the scoring charts in the IPL. Kohli has 6624 runs to his name in 223 matches. He has scored the most number of centuries (five) in IPL history and also holds the record for the most runs in an IPL season — a total of 973 runs that he achieved in 2016.
Kohli has been a real force to reckon for the bowlers ever since he made his IPL debut in 2008. He has gone on to become better and better over the years and that’s why there are no second thoughts in calling him the Baap of batting in the IPL.
Lasith Malinga – The Baap of Bowling
When it comes to bowling in the IPL, only one name stands tall — Lasith Malinga. The Sri Lankan fast bowler played for only one IPL team, the Mumbai Indians, throughout his career and played a pivotal role in making them the most successful franchise in the history of the IPL. Even the best batters found Malinga difficult to play owing to his sheer skills and consistency.
Malinga played 122 IPL matches and claimed 170 wickets at a spectacular average of 19.80. His economy of 7.14 was impressive as it’s very difficult for a fast bowler to maintain such a mean economy over a career spanning that many years. He dominated the wicket-taking charts right through to his last IPL season until Dwayne Bravo took over as the leading wicket-taker in the 2022 season.
Rohit Sharma – The Baap of Captaincy
It was 2013 when legendary Australia player Ricky Ponting left the captaincy midway into the season to pass on the baton of leading an IPL team to a young player named Rohit Sharma, and the rest is history. That turned out to be the beginning of a legacy as Rohit took the Mumbai Indians to the pinnacle of success as their captain, leading them to five IPL titles — the most among all franchises.
Rohit made Mumbai a force to reckon with after they went trophyless in the first five seasons of the tournament. He led them from the front and kept delivering as a batter too, as his record of 5879 runs — the fourth highest among all batters in the history of the league — would suggest.
KL Rahul – The Baap of Consistency
Consistency is something that all players want to bring into their game, but being consistent as a batter in T20 cricket is one of the toughest jobs. But KL Rahul has achieved that with ease. Among the 20 batters with 3000 or more IPL runs to their names, KL Rahul’s average of 48.01 is the highest.
Imagine how consistent you have to be to score close to 4000 IPL runs at an average of just under fifty, that too after playing more than 100 matches. The only player who comes close to matching KL Rahul’s average in the list is David Warner with an average of 42.01, and he is also quite far behind. So Rahul should be proud of this ‘Baap of Consistency’ moniker.
MS Dhoni – The Baap of IPL
There may be many players who have left a mark on certain areas and skillsets in the IPL but when it comes to being the Baap of IPL overall, there can be only one player and he is the evergreen Mahendra Singh Dhoni.
The former India skipper started leading Chennai Super Kings in the inaugural edition in 2008 and is still active in the league at the ripe age of 40 years. In these years, he has also led CSK to four IPL titles, nine finals, and two playoffs overall. And he has done all this while scoring 4978 runs with the bat, the seventh in the list of all-time highest run-scorers. Dhoni is still going strong and has already mentioned that he doesn’t have any plans of stepping down as captain or retiring any time soon. So it looks like we are going to witness the Baap of IPL in action for some more time.
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