A great season for RCB, shaped by the bowlers

It's turning out to be potentially the best season for Royal Challengers Bengaluru (RCB) in the Indian Premier League (IPL). They are sitting right at the top of the table now with seven wins in 10 matches. So, what's been the reason for this?

- Sanjay Manjrekar

For starters, in the seven wins so far, RCB have had six different players as Player-of-the-Match with Krunal Pandya receiving this honour twice. Basically, RCB have had many different heroes through the season and this is always a great sign to look for in a team; a team that's not dependent on a couple of players to win matches.

Individual brilliance can win you some matches but to win consistently you need multiple infusions of brilliance through different sources. Like it's in other formats, it's the bowling attack that sets a team apart; yes, batting is important, but this time around RCB's bowling unit has been in top form.

Almost 50% of the Player-of-the-Match awards have gone to their bowlers. A great achievement in what is essentially an unbalanced format where batters rule in ideal conditions.

Four of these wins for RCB have come in chases and these are the targets their batters had to chase in those four games: 174, 175, 157 and 162. As you can see, RCB had won the game at the halfway stage thanks to their bowlers. Any decent batting line-up can chase such targets in batting conditions under lights, with eight pure batters in the line-up.