Lasith Malinga is the most valuable player (MVP) of IPL 4 so far, beating emerging star Paul Valthaty to second place by just a bit.
When it comes to value for money (VFM), however, the Malayali from Mumbai who's making waves for Kings XI Punjab is streets ahead of all competition.
Behind Malinga and Valthaty in the MVP list are Johan Botha, Robin Uthappa and Doug Bollinger. Sachin Tendulkar heads the second half of the top 10 with Virat Kohli, Kumar Sangakkara, Yusuf Pathan and Jesse Ryder rounding it off.
None of these names, apart of course from Valthaty, makes it anywhere close to the top 10 in the VFM list. That's not surprising given that most of them count their annual fees in millions of dollars while uncapped Indian players like the Kings XI opener have to make do with a maximum of $50,000.
The others on the VFM list are, therefore, predictably local players who have more than pulled their weight for their squads. At No. 2 is Rahul Sharma, followed by Ambati Rayudu, Iqbal Abdulla and Sunny Sohal, in that order. The second half of the top 10 consists of Siddharth Trivedi, Ashok Menaria, Amit Singh, M S Bisla and A G Murtaza.
How have we arrived at these names? A fair bit of number crunching went into it, involving assigning points for batting, bowling, fielding and captaincy on the basis of objective parameters, not subjective opinion, to construct an MVP index.
