Does the IPL and, generally, franchise cricket have anything called home advantage? If yes, which team has aced it the best?
The knockout stages of the UEFA Champions League is played on a home-and-away basis. Until last year, when the scores were tied, away performances were rewarded, as home teams were considered to have an advantage. Home dominance is much more common than away wins in the ongoing NBA season.
What about cricket? In Test matches, the home team gets to control the pitch, at times drawing flak from touring sides. That is understandable for two reasons. The surface changes (mostly deteriorates) over the course of five days. But perhaps more importantly, the home team tries its best to cater to the departments where they hold a significant upper hand.
Neither holds true – at least theoretically – in franchise T20. A 40-over game is not even a session and a half of Test cricket: the rates of deterioration of the pitch are hardly comparable. If anything, the dew often makes it easier for the chasing side. What is more (barring exceptions, of course), conditions in most countries do not appreciably change from one venue to another.
More significantly, franchise T20 teams are not supposed to hold advantages in terms of composition. That is why there are auctions and drafts.
Since they produce quality spinners more often than most sides, India usually prepare turners for home Tests. However, the spinners from the Test, ODI, T20I, India A, domestic, U19, and myriad state league teams get distributed across teams during the IPL. If they do not, the auctions address that. It is also quite probable that for an IPL match, the away team has more local players than the hosts.
India and spinners were merely a case in point. This holds true across countries and disciplines. Franchise-based teams can deliberately strengthen one department, but there is no guarantee that every touring side will not be strong in the same department. Both teams, after all – unlike Test cricket – draw talent from the same pool.
The duration of the game ensures that the better win-loss ratio of home teams decreases with the duration of the format.
However, that is not all. Home advantage is about 14 per cent lower in non-international T20s than in T20Is. Home advantage is indeed flattened out in franchise cricket.
Home domination
On October 26, 2020, Ben Stokes’s unbeaten century in scorching Abu Dhabi helped the Rajasthan Royals beat the Mumbai Indians, resulting in something historic: for the first time in IPL history, the Chennai Super Kings were out of the race for the top four.
What had gone wrong for CSK? Banned for the 2016 and 2017 editions, they had roared back into the league to clinch the title in 2018. They then lost the 2019 final by a solitary run. In the first of these seasons, they had to move base to Pune after one game. In the second, they won six games at Chepauk and lost only twice, both to eventual champions Mumbai Indians. In three of their games, CSK restricted the opposition to 70, 108-9, and 99.
CSK bowled 91.2 overs of spin in these eight games. Imran Tahir, Harbhajan Singh, and Ravindra Jadeja accounted for 84.2 of these. The seamers sent down only 72.4 (40 per cent), of which 48.4 were from Dwayne Bravo and Deepak Chahar. Neither man was express, and both could contribute with the bat.
Read: The Dhoni-fication of Chennai: How a small-town boy became an adopted ‘God’
CSK throttled visiting sides with their slow bowlers. When they ran out of spinners, they turned to seamers who could take the pace off. Across the same games, the touring sides used 82.1 overs of seam (54 per cent) and 70.2 overs of spin.
They were not playing T20 cricket the “mainstream” way. They did not stack their side with power hitters (and fast bowlers) but they chose to choke their opponents, depriving them of pace on slow, low pitches. And they picked their bowling attacks accordingly.
On the road, CSK bowled 86 overs of seam and 88.5 of spin. Nearly equal proportions.
“We break the season into two halves: home matches and away legs. The first and foremost thing is each team plays seven matches at home and you have to maximise it. So our target is to win five of the seven matches we play at Chepauk,” franchise CEO Kasi Viswanathan explained over the course of that season. “Then when we travel outside, we look to win three-four away fixtures which will take the count to about eight wins. That number will mostly put you through to the knockouts.”
That was precisely what CSK did. Their home success was by design, not chance. It was not a one-off either. They had a 4-2 record in Chepauk in 2010. In 2011, they improved it to an astonishing 8-0 (they bowled 41 per cent seam overs). They lifted the trophy on both occasions.
In the history of the IPL, no team comes close to CSK’s home win-loss ratio of 2.5 (until the end of 2024), which is more than twice the ratio for all non-international T20s. With 1.85 at the Sawai Mansingh Stadium in Jaipur, the Rajasthan Royals are a distant second.
RR’s success should not come as a surprise. After all, they were the ones who laid the template, back in the inaugural edition in 2008 when they swept all seven games in Jaipur. At the flip side were the now-defunct Deccan Chargers, who lost all seven games at Uppal, Hyderabad and finished last. And when the league was moved to South Africa the following season, the Chargers aced the neutral venues to lift the trophy.
We had started this section with CSK’s historical elimination in 2020. When they had gone into the 2020 auction, in November 2019, they had picked their squad eyeing an encore at their fortress. But Covid-19 happened, and the IPL had to be moved out of India. There was no home advantage for anyone. CSK plunged to the bottom half for the first time.
Delhi Capitals, the team that had made the least of their home advantage (see the graph above), reached the final for the only time in their history – much like the Chargers in 2009. RCB, who had finished last in 2017 and 2019 in home-and-away seasons, made it to the Playoffs as well.
Is each of these examples a coincidence? Perhaps. But then, even in 2025, we have seen KKR, then CSK (the irony!), then LSG, then RCB being unhappy with the home conditions.
The other advantage
How important is the crowd in games that are as much about festivities and razzmatazz as they are about the cricket?
Let us draw parallels from other sports first. The two venues involved in same-city derbies – the Premier League has many of these – have identical conditions, so where does home advantage come from?
Back in 2007, Harvard concluded that for an additional crowd of 10,000, the home side scored about 0.1 more goals in the Premier League. Another Harvard study, from 2017, showed that NBA referees tended to be biased towards home teams. The 2020 NFL was played during the lockdown, in empty or near-empty venues. Home teams won 127 games and lost 128. There was no home advantage for the first time.
What about the IPL and, generally, cricket? Crowd support surely does not directly alter match results, but they do enhance the performances of the players. Or at least that is what teams and players believe.
There are stories (surely apocryphal) of factory workers around Bramall Lane – about a century ago, when the venue used to host cricket – stoking up the fire when the away team was batting… to impact their visibility. But what about recent times?
While playing junior cricket, Avi Barot had noticed the fielders using synchronised clapping to cheer their bowlers. The idea, on largely empty grounds, was to replicate cheering crowds. Later in his career, he passed it on to his Saurashtra teammates. Under Jaydev Unadkat, they – the dressing-room joined in – used it in the near-empty venues to back their bowlers. “If I’m bowling, and they start clapping and that atmosphere comes up, I really get that punch,” admitted Unadkat.
Unadkat’s Saurashtra reached the Ranji Trophy final thrice in four seasons during this “synchronised clapping” period in the late 2010s. They won it twice – their only titles since 1936/37 (when they used to play as Nawanagar). The quality of cricket was obviously crucial, but they stuck to the practice as well.
The fans, the cheer, the energy – surely they do mean something to the players. In the IPL, what bigger example can there be than CSK of 2018? As mentioned above, when they returned to the fold, their home games had to be moved to Pune after one match. They arranged for a special train to ferry their fans from Chennai.
“It would be a good gesture to give back to the fans who have been the livewire for the team, even when the team was not there for two years,” felt Kasi Viswanathan.
The Whistle Podu Express, they called it, after CSK’s anthem (the two words translate to “blow the whistle”, a constant feature at Chepauk during IPL matches).
Having built a core of experienced cricketers, CSK played excellent cricket to win that title that year. But had fan support not been important, why would they invest in them? Who is to tell that the ocean of yellow shirts, armed with chants and cheers, has not contributed to their success at Chepauk?
