A bigger league, and an auction that broke everything
The IPL went from eight teams to ten in 2022, and the way it did that mattered more than the arithmetic. Gujarat Titans and Lucknow Super Giants came in for a combined sum that dwarfed the original franchise fees, and every existing squad was cut back to four retentions, with the two new teams allowed three picks each, before the mega auction in Bengaluru on 12 and 13 February. Two days of bidding rearranged the whole league. Hardik Pandya came out of it a Gujarat player and a captain, Shreyas Iyer went to Kolkata, and Ishan Kishan was the most expensive buy of the auction.
The league stage ran to 70 matches with ten teams seeded into two groups of five, so that every side still played fourteen games. All of it happened in Mumbai and Pune, in front of crowds for the first time in two years. The pitches at Brabourne and DY Patil were flat, and the season averaged more than 165 an innings.
Buttler, and everyone else
Jos Buttler had the season of his life. He made 863 runs at a strike rate above 149, with three hundreds and a 116 as his best, becoming only the second man after Kohli to score three centuries in one IPL. Rajasthan built their year around him and around Yuzvendra Chahal, who took a hat-trick and 5 for 40 against Kolkata at Brabourne on 18 April in a game Rajasthan won by seven runs after Buttler had made 103.
Elsewhere the two big names collapsed together. Mumbai Indians lost their first eight matches. Chennai, the defending champions, lost their first four. Both finished the league stage with four wins from fourteen, which meant the two most successful franchises in IPL history managed eight victories between them across two months.
Gujarat, who never really wobbled
Gujarat Titans were supposed to be the weakest squad on paper. They were, by most estimates, the best team in the tournament from about the third week onwards. They won ten of fourteen and topped the table. Rashid Khan and Mohammed Shami gave Hardik a control he had never had at Mumbai, and David Miller and Rahul Tewatia kept finishing chases that had no business being finished. The clearest example came at Pune on 17 April, where Miller hit 94 not out off 51 to take Gujarat past Chennai with a ball to spare.
The final at the Narendra Modi Stadium on 29 May drew 101,566 people, a Guinness world record for attendance at a cricket match. Sanju Samson batted first and Rajasthan were held to 130 for 9 by Hardik, who took 3 for 17, and Rashid. Gujarat chased it with eleven balls to spare, Shubman Gill 45 not out, Miller 32 off 19. Hardik got the player-of-the-match award for both halves of the job.
Why it stuck
A new franchise won the IPL at the first attempt, which had never happened before and has not happened since. It also settled an argument about Hardik Pandya. He had come into the season not bowling, dropped from the India side, and left it as a captain who had won a title and taken three wickets in the final. Lucknow, the other new team, reached the playoffs too. The mega auction, for all the noise about loyalty and broken teams, produced the least predictable season the league had had in years.