How much does a single run matter in cricket?
In 143 years of Test cricket, just one of the 2,393 games has been decided by a margin of one run. West Indies defeated Australia by the narrowest margin to make a comeback in the Adelaide Test in 1993. Eventually, the visitors went on to win the series 2-1. There have been just two ties in Test cricket and Australia again finds a place in history books—against West Indies (1960) and India (1986).
In One Day Internationals (ODIs), a single run has separated winners from losers 32 times in 4,261 games played till September 16, 2020. Thirty-eight matches have ended in a tie. Among them are the two famous World Cup games. Australia-South Africa semi-final in 1999 was a historic tied result and so was the World Cup final in 2019 (England vs. New Zealand). Australia and England were declared winners on technicalities.
Fifteen of 1,097 Twenty20 internationals have been decided by a margin of one run. Nineteen games were tied but the slam-bang format has tie-breakers —bowl out or super over—to decide the winner.
The Indian Premier League (IPL) inherently thrives on smaller margins because of the excitement it generates. Yet, in 12 seasons of IPL, there have been just eight super-over games while 10 matches have been decided by the thinnest of the margins.
If Rohit Sharma is the most successful captain in IPL’s short history—with four titles under his belt—he owes some of the silverware to that one-run margin.
For the Mumbai Indians, lightning did strike twice —2017 and 2019—when they won the IPL trophy by a run. No captain in the history of cricket has been as lucky as Rohit to win a marquee tournament by a hair on two occasions.
We know the lucky captain but who were the ones to miss out on IPL championships by a whisker. Well, it was Mahendra Singh Dhoni, often referred to as “luckiest of them all”, on both the occasions.
In 2017, Dhoni was leading Pune Supergiants—Chennai Super Kings was serving a two-year ban. Despite his team’s dream run, he was denied the trophy. In 2019, Dhoni, this time leading Chennai Super Kings, again lost out to Rohit because of that one run.
If someone tells you that a run doesn’t sit well with IPL’s big-hitting reputation, just point them to Dhoni. But for those two agonizing singles, Dhoni would have had a record five IPL trophies, one more than Rohit Sharma’s four.
(Vimal Kumar is a senior sports journalist who has covered multiple cricket world cups and Rio Olympics in the last two decades. Vimal is also the author of Sachin: Cricketer Of The Century and The Cricket Fanatic’s Essential Guide.)
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