IPL 2021: Average age of all teams in the season

It is often regarded that once a player crosses 35, he/she might lose reflex and become a liability to the team. Cricketers have systematically proved that the hypothesis does not hold good always. The average age is a measure that reflects a squad’s resolution to make way for the next-gen cricketers. Fielding and running between the wickets are departments in which a player’s athleticism might be restricted due to one’s age.

Dropping catches, inability to save boundaries, incompetency to rotate the strike are some of the characteristics that get added to the trait of a player as he/she grows old. For instance, Chris Gayle, owing to age reasons, does not rotate the strike by taking quick singles.

He usually fields in the short third man or short fine leg position as he is not quick enough. These are some of the flip-side to the aging of a player. In the IPL where the competition is cut-throat, having a blend of youngsters and veterans becomes important.

Below lies the teams with their average squad age ahead of IPL 2021:

1. Chennai Super Kings – 30

The three-time IPL champions had a hard time getting things right in the previous edition of the competition. They were labeled and mocked as ‘Daddy’s Army’ during their comeback campaign due to the lack of young players in the squad.

Things have not changed much in terms of the average age of the squad for the men in yellow over the past few years. Terminating the services of Shane Watson and Harbhajan Singh has substantially reduced the mean squad age from 32 to 30.

The probability of playing young talents like Sai Kishore, Narayan Jagadeesan, Hari Nishanth, Harishankar Reddy, and KM Asif to start a game adoring the yellow jersey is highly unlikely, meaning that the average age of the starting eleven will be much higher.