Shardul Thakur: The Most Expensive Bowler Nobody Drops

Shardul Thakur has taken 119 wickets in 114 Indian Premier League matches at an economy rate of 9.57. Among bowlers who have taken a hundred or more wickets in the competition, nobody has conceded runs at a worse rate. He has bowled 2,202 deliveries and been hit for 339 fours and 142 sixes.

He has also played for seven different franchises, been bought at auction repeatedly into his thirties, and been picked in India squads across all three formats. That combination is either a fifteen-year failure of judgement by everybody involved, or the economy rate is measuring the wrong thing. It is the second one, and the reason is worth setting out properly, because Thakur is the clearest case in the tournament of a player whose value does not survive contact with a summary statistic.

The numbers, computed and unflattering

From the ball-by-ball archive of every IPL match played through the 2026 season: 2,202 balls, 3,514 runs, 119 wickets. An economy rate of 9.57, an average of 29.53, and a wicket every 18.5 deliveries.

Read those four numbers in the order a scout would. The economy rate is bad. The average is mediocre. The strike rate is genuinely good — a wicket every three overs is better than a great many well-regarded bowlers manage, and better than the career strike rates of several bowlers with far better reputations.

Phase	Balls	Runs	Wkts	Econ	Avg
Overs 1-6	724	1,142	29	9.46	39.38
Overs 7-15	729	1,033	35	8.50	29.51
Overs 16-20	749	1,339	55	10.73	24.35

The split is remarkably even — roughly 730 deliveries in each phase — and it is the most revealing thing about him. Almost no other bowler in the competition's history has bowled that evenly across all three phases of an innings. Specialists cluster: Rashid Khan is a middle-overs bowler, Dwayne Bravo was a death bowler, Jofra Archer is a powerplay-and-death bowler. Thakur has been asked to bowl everywhere, in every match, whenever a captain needed an over from someone.

That is the answer to the economy rate. He has spent his career bowling the overs nobody else wanted — the sixth over when the openers are set, the eighteenth when the plan has failed, the twelfth when a partnership is running away. A bowler who only ever bowls in comfortable situations has a good economy rate partly because of when he bowls. Thakur's 10.73 at the death is a bad number; it is also a number generated by being the man handed the ball when the other options had already been used or were being protected.

Why captains keep giving him the ball

The functional answer is that he takes wickets, and he takes them in a way that does not depend on conditions. Thakur bowls right-arm fast-medium with a slightly slingy, low-armed action, hits the pitch hard, and moves the ball both ways off the seam without much regard for whether the surface is helping. He is not fast enough to bowl anyone out with pace and not accurate enough to squeeze, but he finds the edge and the leading edge at a rate that produces a wicket every three overs across more than 2,000 deliveries.

The second answer is that he is a genuine seam-bowling option who can bat, which changes the arithmetic of a team sheet. In the IPL he has made 349 runs at a strike rate of 133.21, which is a lower-order contribution rather than an asset. In Test cricket it has been a great deal more than that.

Chennai, and the eight-year arrangement

Franchise	Balls	Wkts	Econ	Avg
Chennai Super Kings	1,203	60	9.09	30.38
Delhi Capitals	290	15	9.79	31.53
Lucknow Super Giants	204	13	11.03	28.85
Rising Pune Supergiant	229	11	8.25	28.64
Mumbai Indians	132	12	12.27	22.50
Kolkata Knight Riders	126	7	10.48	31.43

More than half his career deliveries came at Chennai Super Kings, where he took 60 wickets across several seasons at his best franchise economy rate. The Mumbai row is the outlier worth noting: twelve wickets at an average of 22.50 while conceding 12.27 an over, which is the most extreme version of his whole profile compressed into one spell of employment.

His best figures in the competition are 4 for 34, against Lucknow at Uppal in the 2025 season, and he has three separate four-wicket returns spread across 2022, 2025 and 2026 — a decade apart from his early years, which is the other point about him. A bowler with this economy rate who was merely being tolerated would have stopped being bought around 2020. He was still taking twelve wickets in a season in 2026.

The Test career, and the two innings that made a nickname

The thing that most complicates the picture is his batting, and specifically two innings in 2021.

At Brisbane in January, in the final Test of a series India were not expected to be competitive in, Thakur made 67 and put on 123 for the seventh wicket with Washington Sundar to deny Australia a substantial first-innings lead. India won the match and the series. It was his second Test.

At The Oval in September he made 57 from 36 balls, reaching fifty in 31 deliveries — the fastest Test fifty ever recorded in England, and the second-fastest by an Indian after Kapil Dev's 30-ball effort in Karachi in 1982. He made another fifty in the second innings. India won a Test they had appeared to be losing.

These are not the innings of a bowler who can hold a bat. Two fifties in a Test at The Oval, and a match-turning 67 at the Gabba, are contributions a specialist number six would be pleased to claim. They are the origin of the "Lord Shardul" nickname, which began as a joke about him arriving whenever India needed rescuing and then became difficult to argue with.

The relevance to the franchise argument is direct. A bowler who concedes 9.57 an over is expensive. A bowler who concedes 9.57 an over, takes a wicket every three overs, bats with genuine competence and never breaks down is a squad asset, and that combination is why the auction has never stopped paying for him.

What the record does not support

Two things should be said against him, clearly.

The first is that he has never been a first-choice Indian bowler in any format for a sustained period. His India appearances are scattered across a decade, and in every settled attack he has been the fourth or fifth seamer. Jasprit Bumrah, Mohammed Shami and Mohammed Siraj are the tier above, and there is no reading of the numbers in which he belongs in it.

The second is that the economy rate is not entirely an artefact of deployment. He does bowl loose balls, at a higher rate than a bowler of his experience should, and the powerplay average of 39.38 says that when he is given the new ball in favourable circumstances he does not consistently take advantage. A career economy rate approaching ten in a competition where the average has stayed below nine for most of his career means he has cost his sides real matches.

The case, stated once

The defensible summary is that Thakur has been continuously undervalued by the single number people quote about him and continuously correctly valued by the people who actually pick teams.

Seven franchises across eleven seasons is not a series of mistakes. It is a market repeatedly concluding that a bowler who takes wickets in every phase, bats to a standard that has twice turned a Test, and is available every single year, is worth the runs he concedes. The economy rate is the price of the wickets, not evidence against them.

There is a broader point here about how T20 bowling is assessed. Economy rate is the statistic that reads most naturally and the one most contaminated by role. The bowler who bowls the eighteenth over of a chase that is already lost, the sixth over to a set opener, the extra over after a specialist has been taken out of the attack — that bowler's economy rate is measuring his captain's problems as much as his own. Thakur has spent a career being that bowler, and the strike rate is the column that survives the contamination.

For the full season-by-season figures and career record across formats, see the Shardul Thakur profile. The phase and franchise splits here were computed from the ball-by-ball archive covering every IPL match through the 2026 season, taking overs one to six as the powerplay, seven to fifteen as the middle and sixteen to twenty as the death, and counting only wickets credited to the bowler; his Test batting figures are published career records.