A season that finally broke the bat-ball balance
IPL 2024 is the season Indian cricket stopped pretending the contest was even. The impact player rule was in its second year, teams were batting eleven deep, and the scoreboard responded. Sunrisers Hyderabad made 277 for 3 against Mumbai Indians at Uppal on 27 March. Mumbai chased with 246 for 5 and still lost by 31. Between them the two sides had rewritten the record for the highest total and the highest second-innings total in the same evening. Sunrisers went past 260 twice more before the league stage was done.
The tournament ran from 22 March to 26 May across thirteen cities, and it very nearly did not run in India at all. The Lok Sabha election overlapped the second half, and through February there was serious talk of shifting the season overseas as had happened in 2009 and 2014. The BCCI held its ground. Arun Dhumal confirmed on 14 February that the IPL would stay at home, and the schedule was released in two parts, the first twenty-one matches on 22 February and the rest only on 25 March once the Election Commission had published polling dates. No match was moved abroad. The venue shuffles that did happen had other causes: Delhi Capitals played their first two home games at Visakhapatnam because the Arun Jaitley Stadium was tied up after the Women's Premier League, while Rajasthan Royals took two home matches to Guwahati and Punjab Kings two to Dharamshala.
Kolkata's quiet, ruthless year
Kolkata Knight Riders were not the team anyone tipped in March. Shreyas Iyer had missed most of the previous season, Gautam Gambhir had just returned as mentor, and the batting looked top-heavy. It turned out to be the most complete side in the competition. Sunil Narine opened, made a hundred against Rajasthan and finished as Most Valuable Player. Phil Salt attacked the powerplay. Andre Russell and Rinku Singh finished. Mitchell Starc, bought for 24.75 crore and mocked for six weeks, bowled his best cricket exactly when it counted.
Then the rain came. Three of the last eight league games were washed out, at Ahmedabad, Hyderabad and Guwahati, and the split points decided the top four as much as any result did. Kolkata topped the table anyway and beat Sunrisers by eight wickets in Qualifier 1.
Twenty-two overs at Chepauk
The final was over almost before the second innings began. Starc removed Abhishek Sharma with the first ball he bowled, Russell took 3 for 19, and Sunrisers were bowled out for 113 in 18.3 overs. Venkatesh Iyer made 52 not out from 26 balls. Kolkata finished it in 10.3 overs with 57 deliveries to spare, the shortest final the IPL has ever staged and a strange anticlimax to a season of 250-plus totals.
Virat Kohli took the Orange Cap with 741 runs, his second, at a strike rate that quietened a long argument about his tempo without ending it. Harshal Patel's 24 wickets won the Purple Cap in a season where bowling economy under nine was treated as a triumph. What 2024 changed was the conversation. By the end of it, administrators were openly discussing whether the impact player rule had gone too far, and captains were saying out loud that 200 was now a par score.