CPL Is Cricket's Boom-or-Bust League

The Caribbean Premier League is back, and it happens to be my favourite T20 franchise league, not including The Hundred (I jest — yes, I know, not even a T20 league). But while getting ready for the 2026 season, I asked myself why I enjoy this league so much. And I landed on this: I love the battle between batter and bowler in the CPL. It gives a unique boom-or-bust feel in a league where that fight feels genuinely even.

So how does one go about proving a claim like that? To start, I dove into the numbers and found some interesting ones. First, dot-ball percentage — yawn, I know. Over the past five seasons, the CPL has averaged 36% of balls faced being dot balls. That's the highest of any major T20 league by a clear margin; most sit around 30%, while SA20 bucks the trend a little at 33%. It's not just an average either — CPL has posted the highest dot-ball rate of the group in every single one of the last five seasons. The rate is falling league-wide, from 38.9% in 2021 to 33.7% in 2025, but CPL has stayed on top of the pack the whole way down. A CPL batter is doing precisely nothing on roughly 5% more balls than batters anywhere else.

On its own, a high dot-ball rate just sounds like boring cricket — bowlers dominating on slow surfaces, nothing explosive. But that's not the picture at all. When CPL batters do connect, KA-BOOM: 7% of all balls faced over the past five seasons have gone for six, the second-highest rate in the group behind only the IPL, which sits just below 7.5%.

That combination is why "even battle" feels like a more honest description than "bowler-dominated." Every other league in the group picks a lane: the ones with high dot-ball rates don't also lead in sixes, and the ones that hit the most sixes don't also have bowlers shutting batters down this often. CPL does both. Bowlers are getting more dot balls than anywhere else, and batters are still hitting sixes at close to the IPL's rate.

To conclude, let's look at totals — and when we do, the CPL appears as a league with lower run totals. Teams in the league are averaging 160.9 runs, closer to BBL's 160.0 and SA20's 159.7 than to the IPL's 181.2 or PSL's 174.1. The league hits sixes like the IPL, yet scores runs more in line with the BBL and SA20. And this mix, in my opinion, creates a must-see league for any cricket fan!