What a finisher actually looks like in the numbers

Ask ten cricket fans to name a finisher and you will get ten answers, most of them chosen because of one innings they remember. That is how the word is usually used: a feeling about a player who seems to turn up at the end of an innings and change it. It is a useful instinct and a terrible definition. If you are trying to price a player, pick a team or settle an argument, you need a definition you can check against the scorecards.

This article builds one from ball-by-ball data. It uses every IPL innings in the 2025 and 2026 seasons, 148 matches in total, and looks only at the last five overs of each innings, overs 16 to 20, where the finishing is done. It sets out what a finisher has to do to qualify, lists the nine players in the league who currently meet the standard, explains who just misses and why, and looks at what the league pays them. The numbers are CricOptics's own, drawn from the same ball-by-ball records used everywhere else on the site, and the definition is a judgement that the article states openly so that you can disagree with it.

The baseline: what the death overs look like

Start with the league as a whole, because a finisher is only impressive relative to what everyone else does. Across the 148 matches, batters scored 12,377 runs off 7,258 legal balls in overs 16 to 20. That is a strike rate of 170.5. In overs 1 to 15 the same batters scored at 150.0, and in the first six overs at 155.3. The death overs are the fastest part of the innings by a distance of about twenty runs per hundred balls over the middle and fifteen over the powerplay.

That has an uncomfortable consequence for anyone who wants to call a batter a finisher because he scores at 170. In the current league, 170 is the average at the death, not a high mark. Hitting at 170 in the last five overs is simply keeping pace. To stand out you have to be clearly above that, and you have to do it for long enough that the number means something.

The second consequence is that length of time at the crease matters as much as the rate. A batter who faces twelve balls in the death overs across a whole season can have any strike rate you like, because twelve balls is a very small sample. A player who has faced 150 balls there has done something repeatedly.

The definition

CricOptics calls a batter a proper finisher if he meets four conditions over the last two seasons.

First, he is not a bowler by role. This is a batting definition, and a bowler who scores a handful of lower-order runs in a hurry has not been counted.

Second, he comes in late: his average position in the order, counting the openers as one and two, is 4.5 or later. That keeps out the top-order batters who simply happen to stay in until the end.

Third, he has faced at least 80 balls in the death overs. Over two seasons, that is about forty balls a season, enough that one lucky cameo cannot carry the figure.

Fourth, he has scored at 170 or better in those overs, and has had at least three innings in which he scored 25 or more runs off at least ten balls there. That last condition is the one that answers the thing people actually mean. Twenty-five off ten balls and more is the kind of contribution that moves a team's total by a matter of ten or fifteen runs. Anyone can hit three sixes in ten balls once. A finisher does it three times in two seasons.

It is worth seeing how selective this is. In the two seasons, 191 batters faced at least one ball in the death overs. Only 64 faced forty or more, and only 32 faced eighty or more. Of those 32, 21 scored at 170 or better, and 15 also had three or more big innings. Once you add the requirement that they come in late and are not bowlers, nine remain.

Across the 148 matches there were 1,066 individual innings in which a batter faced a ball at the death, and 146 of them, about 13.7 per cent, were a 25-off-10 innings. So a big death innings is rare, one in seven, which makes three of them in two seasons a meaningful record.

The nine

Here are the nine who qualify as of the end of the 2026 season, in order of runs scored in the last five overs.

Shashank Singh of Punjab Kings has scored 330 runs off 169 balls at the death, a strike rate of 195, with four big innings. His average batting position is 6.3. He is the most prolific of the group, and his current contract is ₹5.5 crore.

Tim David of Royal Challengers Bengaluru has 303 runs off 150 balls, a strike rate of 202, and five big innings, the joint most in the group. He bats at an average of 6.1. His current contract is ₹3.0 crore, the third-lowest of the nine.

Rinku Singh of Kolkata Knight Riders has 292 runs off 143 balls at 204, with five big innings, from an average position of 5.7. His contract is ₹13 crore, the highest in the group.

Ashutosh Sharma of Delhi Capitals has 289 runs off 148 balls at 195, with four big innings, at an average of 6.9. He is on ₹3.8 crore.

Naman Dhir of Mumbai Indians has 239 runs off 128 balls at 187, with three big innings, at 5.2. His contract is ₹5.25 crore.

Marcus Stoinis of Punjab Kings has 230 runs off just 94 balls, a strike rate of 245, the highest in the group by a long way, with four big innings, at an average of 6.0. He is on ₹11 crore. He is the best example of a player who qualifies on rate and big innings but with the smallest volume, 94 balls, barely clearing the 80 the definition asks for.

Donavon Ferreira of Rajasthan Royals has 185 runs off 86 balls at 215, with three big innings, at 6.1. His contract is ₹1.0 crore.

Abdul Samad of Lucknow Super Giants has 160 runs off 90 balls at 178, with three big innings, at 5.9. He is on ₹4.2 crore.

Shubham Dubey of Rajasthan Royals has 140 runs off 82 balls at 171, with three big innings, at 7.1. He is on ₹0.8 crore, the lowest in the group, and his rate is the lowest too, which is a reminder that the 170 line is a minimum and somebody has to sit just above it.

Together the nine have scored 2,168 runs off 1,090 balls at the death, a combined strike rate of 199, which is about 28 points above the league rate of 170.5. They are not just keeping pace. In the last five overs they score roughly 28 more runs per hundred balls than the league as a whole.

Who just misses

The more instructive list may be the near misses, because each one shows what the definition is really testing.

Heinrich Klaasen of Sunrisers Hyderabad has scored 335 runs off 174 balls at the death at 193, with five big innings. By the numbers he is the most productive death batter in the league. He misses on a technicality of position: his average batting position is 4.4, just under the 4.5 line. The definition is deliberately a line and not a verdict, and Klaasen is the sort of case where reasonable people will put the line a little lower.

Shreyas Iyer of Punjab Kings has 331 runs off 150 balls at 221, with six big innings. He bats on average at 3.7, so he is a top-order batter who is still there at the end, not someone who comes in to finish. The same is true of Nicolas Pooran of Lucknow Super Giants, average position 3.5, 165 runs off 74 balls at 223, of Rajat Patidar of Royal Challengers Bengaluru, 3.9, 195 runs off 94 balls at 207, and of Dhruv Jurel of Rajasthan Royals, 3.9, 231 runs off 132 balls at 175. Each does the job in numbers, from a higher position.

Tilak Varma of Mumbai Indians, 246 runs off 109 balls at 226, bats at 4.6 and has two big innings, one short of the standard. Tristan Stubbs of Delhi Capitals has 276 runs off 162 balls and a strike rate of 170, but two big innings. Jitesh Sharma of Royal Challengers Bengaluru, 215 off 123 at 175, and Nitish Kumar Reddy of Sunrisers Hyderabad, 183 off 90 at 203, each also have two.

Then there are the players who face plenty of death-over balls and score at a good rate by most standards but below the finisher line. Shivam Dube of Chennai Super Kings has 243 off 158 at 154. Ravindra Jadeja of Rajasthan Royals has 242 off 161 at 150. Hardik Pandya of Mumbai Indians has 220 off 141 at 156. All three have three big innings and bat late. They are valuable players, and they score at a rate that is a little below the league's death-over average. A finisher, by this definition, is someone who is above the league rate when it matters, not someone who is simply batting at the end.

What the league pays them

The nine contracts add up to ₹47.6 crore: 13 plus 11 plus 5.5 plus 5.25 plus 4.2 plus 3.8 plus 3.0 plus 1.0 plus 0.8. That is not evenly spread. Rinku Singh and Marcus Stoinis between them are on ₹24 crore, just over half the total. The other seven are on ₹23.6 crore combined, and four of them are on ₹4 crore or less.

One crude way to look at it is death-over runs per crore of contract. Ferreira has scored 185 for ₹1 crore, Dubey 140 for ₹0.8 crore, and David 303 for ₹3 crore. At the other end, Rinku has 292 for ₹13 crore and Stoinis 230 for ₹11 crore. That is a very rough comparison, because a contract pays for everything a player does and not just the last five overs, and because some of these contracts were signed before the two seasons being measured. But it does show that the market has not priced the role in a uniform way. Some of the players doing the job at the highest rate are among the cheapest in the group.

How CricOptics uses this

This is the reason the site's player price check treats finishers separately. The general model it uses to rank players looks at last season's contract, form over two seasons, career record and role, and none of those things captures a death-overs specialist well. Form, as measured over whole innings, spreads every ball across the innings and so understates a batter whose value is concentrated in the last five overs.

So for the nine players who meet the definition above, and only for them, CricOptics measures a death-overs impact: the runs scored in overs 16 to 20 above what a replacement batter would score off the same balls, plus a bonus for each big innings. It then ranks the nine by that impact and places them in a band between a modest finisher and a top one, and lifts their standing in the price check to match. As of this writing that gives Rinku Singh about ₹14 crore, Tim David about ₹11 crore, Shashank Singh about ₹10 crore and Ashutosh Sharma about ₹8 crore as the likely price.

It is worth being plain about what this is. The band is a judgement, set so that the strongest finisher sits at roughly the price of a strong top-order player and the weakest qualified finisher at about the price of a solid squad regular. It has not been tested against what finishers actually sell for, there are too few of them for that, and the accuracy figures the price check publishes do not include it. The reason to apply it anyway is that without it the tool undervalued a player whose job is to score a lot of runs very quickly in the last few overs, which is the one thing it should not undervalue.

The limits of this analysis

A definition built from two seasons is only as good as two seasons. A batter can have a poor stretch, a long injury or a change of role, and fall out of the list while still being a finisher in any sensible use of the word. The 80-ball minimum is a compromise between catching real finishers and excluding small samples, and a player at 78 balls is no different from one at 82. Position is an average, and it hides the difference between a batter who goes in at six every time and one who bats at three half the time and eight the other half.

The data also does not know the match situation. Twenty-five off ten balls in a chase that is already won is not the same as twenty-five off ten balls with the match in the balance, and nothing here separates them. It does not know who the bowlers were or what the pitch was doing, and it does not see fielding, keeping or captaincy at all.

What it does give you is a way to talk about the question with evidence. A finisher, on this definition, is a batter who comes in late, has faced a real number of balls at the death, scores clearly above the league's death-over rate, and has done something big several times. Nine players are on that list today. If your favourite is not one of them, look at which condition they miss and by how much. The answer is often more interesting than the list.