Modern T20 batting has converged on Strike Rate as the key metric for judging batting quality. But a high strike rate can hide a slow start: a high-SR batter might take a long time to reach that SR. The idea of finishing anchors, from Jarrod Kimber and Varun Alvakonda, describes players like David Miller and Tristan Stubbs who start slow and then make up for it by attacking heavily at the death, finishing with a healthy strike rate. Looking at the final strike rate alone doesn't tell you the impact of the innings, and especially the risk these players carry if they get out early, before the acceleration ever arrives.
Players who are able to ramp up their hitting faster are more useful early. The match doesn't get worse while they're batting, and even if they get out more often, the rest of the batting order still has a chance to win from a position that hasn't been damaged.
Put simply: start speed, how quickly a batter reaches his hitting gear, is a distinct and measurable skill that strike rate hides; and the slowness is itself a risk, building pressure and raising the chance of a wicket before the acceleration ever arrives.
The Delhi Capitals problem
decent strike rates, very slow starts
Delhi Capitals are this season's clearest example. They played multiple batters with decent strike rates who started very slowly and took a lot of time to reach their hitting arc. Stubbs, Miller, Rizvi and Rana were all slow starters. Below is each team's top five batters by balls faced, broken down by δ per ball, categorised by how many balls the batter had personally faced (rows, fresh at the top) and the phase of the innings they batted in (columns). δ comes from Delta (Misra & Rajaraman) and measures how a ball moved the projected par score: a positive δ means the batter scored more than expected on that ball, a negative δ means less.
Compare this to RCB, who have prioritised batters who can start and ramp up their innings fast. The first five balls for most of the DC top order (the top row of each grid) are worse than their RCB counterparts. Because they took so long to get up to a good scoring rate, they piled pressure on their teammates and left themselves vulnerable to collapses and below-par totals, with the slow-accelerating batter often getting out before he ever got going.
And the grid already controls for when a batter came in, which is really the point: "negative at the start" isn't a fixed trait, it depends on the phase you walk into. Most of DC's top order start underwater in the phase they usually enter; RCB's mostly start above par. The exceptions there are phase-specific: Krunal is red only when he comes in mid-innings during a collapse and TH David starts negative when he walks in at the death.
A first lens: True Strike Rate, start vs whole innings
where a slow starter hides behind a good overall number
Another metric for the scoring rate of a batter is True Strike Rate: runs scored above the expected (par) runs for that exact situation, measured per ball. Here I compare a batter's True SR at the start of the innings (first six balls) against their True SR over the whole innings.
The top-right quadrant holds the elite players: high True SR overall, and they start fast as well. The bottom-right shows players who start fast but slow down. And the top-left (high overall, negative at the start) is the finishing-anchor pattern from the top of this piece, now on a chart: Miller sits right there, the slow starter who cashes in late.
A metric for the start itself
how fast, and how often
That scatter ranks batters by how much they out-score par at the start, and a naive start metric would do the same: True SR over the first six balls. But how much isn't how fast. An average is easily swayed by one or two big innings, so a couple of explosive starts can make a streaky batter look like an elite starter. Yashasvi Jaiswal, for instance, ranks 5th this season by True SR over his first six balls, but in several matches he started much slower, barely above a run a ball, and a couple of big starts lifted his average. He wasn't really a faster starter than someone like Suryavanshi or Padikkal. What we actually want is a metric for speed and consistency: how quickly a batter gets going, and how often.
For each innings we find the ball where the batter accelerates past the league-average strike rate for the phase each ball is bowled in, and stays above that rate. Aggregating across all of their innings gives a cumulative incidence curve; the area under it is the score (the metric we call Starting Gear), which rewards batters who get going early and do it often.
Like the True SR graph above, it measures players who score above the baseline rate, but it also captures how fast they got above it and how reliably, and the baseline takes the phase of the innings into account. By this measure Jaiswal ranks 21st rather than 5th, which lines up much better with the match-viewing experience this season.
Play with it below: edit a single innings, then build the curve up across many.
Suryavanshi, everyone's new favourite, tops this list too: he accelerates fast and very often. By contrast, someone like David Miller starts slow and reaches the league-average rate in only some of his innings.
The leaderboard
fast starters of IPL 2026
Here is the full leaderboard of fast starters from the IPL 2026 season, ranked by Starting Gear. Alongside it sit Net-Asset (the value version, which charges the wicket) and three plain scoring references: True SR and raw strike rate over the first six balls, and True SR across the whole innings.
Washington Sundar was a surprising name this season: Starting Gear pushes him into the top 10 because he reliably clears the phase-average bar and gets going early, more consistently than his reputation suggests. Another to note is Virat Kohli, who has revamped his game and is now a top-20 starter in the league. Delhi Capitals, on the other hand, have three starters in the bottom 10 (Miller, Stubbs and Rizvi), and only Ashutosh and Nissanka inside the top 30.
It's important to recognise the value of starting and accelerating fast across a batting order in T20s, not just the final strike rate, when evaluating the modern T20 batter and the value they provide to the team.
Appendix: converting the start
starting fast isn't the whole job
Of course, starting fast isn't the only criterion: batters must also convert those starts into a positive impact on the team's total. A batter who gets out early despite starting fast doesn't add much value. Below is Starting Gear against a value based metric Net-Asset (which measures how fast a batsman accumulates positive delta in their innings). Both reward getting going quickly, and both count getting out before you get there; the difference is that Net-Asset also charges the cost of the wicket, so a fast start that ends in an early dismissal banks less value. A batter who starts fast but gets out cheaply rates high on Starting Gear and low on Net-Asset. That vertical gap between the two is the risk from the top of this piece made visible, a fast start the wicket eats (bottom-right) versus value actually banked (top). You can see the good batting teams consolidating in the top-right, while KKR and DC sit bottom-left.