Orange Cap chase tightens

Vaibhav Sooryavanshi has turned the Indian Premier League’s Orange Cap race into a midseason sprint, sitting 37 runs off the lead after six matches. (outlookindia.com) As of April 21, Heinrich Klaasen of Sunrisers Hyderabad led the run charts with 283 runs in six innings, while Sooryavanshi had 246 for Rajasthan Royals. Shubman Gill was next on 251 and Virat Kohli had 247, leaving four batters separated by 37 runs. (timesofindia.indiatimes.com) Sooryavanshi’s rise has been driven by speed as much as volume. He reached 246 runs at a strike rate a little above 236, after earlier scores of 52, 31, 39 and 78 had already pushed him to the top of the table for a stretch this month. (outlookindia.com) (espncricinfo.com) The Orange Cap goes to the tournament’s leading run-scorer, so the table can swing quickly when teams have played different numbers of matches. At this stage, Gill had played four matches, while Klaasen, Kohli and Sooryavanshi had each played six. (timesofindia.indiatimes.com) That made the leaderboard unusually fluid even before another round of games. ESPNcricinfo’s updated records page later showed Abhishek Sharma moving to No. 1 with 323 runs in seven matches, Klaasen on 320, and Sooryavanshi on 254 in seven. (espncricinfo.com) Klaasen’s case for the cap has come from consistency rather than one outsized score. The South Africa batter had averaged 47.16 through six matches with two half-centuries and a strike rate above 144. (timesofindia.indiatimes.com) Sooryavanshi’s push has also tracked Rajasthan’s batting-heavy start. In one earlier update, ESPNcricinfo had Rajasthan Royals holding the top three Orange Cap spots through Sooryavanshi, Yashasvi Jaiswal and Dhruv Jurel after a four-match winning run. (espncricinfo.com) With the table this compressed, one 70 or 80 can reorder the top five in a night. That is why the Orange Cap race has become a running subplot of the season, not just a line on the stats page. (timesofindia.indiatimes.com) (espncricinfo.com)