Should The IPL Orange Cup Award Be Scrapped?
Why is the Orange Cap awarded to the player who simply scores the most runs—and not to the one whose runs actually win matches?
The orange cap is awarded to the highest run-scorer in the Indian Premier League each season. Duh! Any cricket fanatic watching the IPL since 2008 would be able to tell you that! It is supposed to tell us who dominated the season with their bats. But it is the full picture really?
Mind you the Orange cap does not reward the best batter in the IPL. It rewards the batter with the most opportunity to score the highest runs irrespective of whether it contributed to the team winning the game.
Take the most recent evidence from the IPL 2026 that still has the leadership board revealing. In the recent match between Kolkata Knight Riders and Sunrisers Hyderabad, 21-year-old Angkrish Raghuvanshi scored 103 runs winning the orange cap while the other competitors include Ryan Rickelton with 81 runs, Ishaan Kishan at 80 and Rohit Sharma at 78. All are separated by the statistical margin of a well-timed edge.
Last season, the tournament awarded the Orange Cap with 759 runs in 15 innings at a strike rate of 156 while Suryakumar Yadav made 717 runs at a strike rate of nearly 168. In other words, the race to crown the "highest run scorer" in the tournament is currently being decided by who has had one good evening. What matters most is how much you scored than how it was scored.
So then, why is the Orange Cap awarded to the player who simply scores the most runs—and not to the one whose runs actually win matches?
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This is a complaint that South African cricketer AB de Villiers recently pointed out and is something that many within the game perhaps quietly acknowledge. The cricketer made his frustration clear regarding comparisons between him and openers in T20 cricket. Openers often have a better chance at winning the Orange cap. Openers face more balls, settle into conditions earlier, and begin their innings in the most favourable phase of the game — the powerplay, where fielding restrictions tilt the balance toward the batter. The middle order, by contrast, inherits volatility: fewer deliveries, higher required rates, and often, better bowlers at the death. The cricketer made his frustrations clear.
"I hate it when they compare my runs to other players in the IPL because then I go, 'But I haven't faced as many balls as the openers.' It irritates the living daylights out of me," de Villiers said, speaking to former Zimbabwe cricketer and reputed commentator Pommie Mbangwa.
It is a simple point, but a revealing one. If opportunity is uneven, can the outcome really be called a fair measure of excellence? And yet, sport has always had a soft spot for simple answers.
Football, for instance, awards the Golden Boot to its highest goal-scorer, a metric no less blunt than the Orange Cap. It does not account for assists, build-up play, defensive work, or the quality of opposition. A tap-in counts the same as a 30-yard strike. And still, the awards endures, season after season, as one of the game's coveted honours. To score more of them is, almost by definition, to exert greater influence on results. The simplicity of the metric holds because the act it measures is inherently valuable.
Runs in T20 cricket do not behave the same way. They're more frequent, and far more dependent on context. A batter can score heavily without necessarily shifting the balance of a game, just as another can play a brief, high-impact innings that turns the result without troubling the top of the leaderboard.
This is where the Orange Cap begins to feel out of step with the format it represents. It borrows the language of sporting greatness, that more is better. But does so without accounting for the peculiar demands of T20 cricket, where timing often out weighs tally.
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IPL Is Not Cricket
As much as the tournament is a format of the cricketing sport, it is just as much a spectacle and a form of entertainment. The Orange Cap then is part of that aspect of entertainment. It gives the tournament a sense of continuity, a race within the race. Something you track at a glance.
Rather than scrapping it altogether, the Orange Cap should remain but no longer stand alone. Imagine pairing it with a parallel measure of batting impact: one that factors in strike rate, match situation, and the phase of play. One that recognises the difference between consolidation and acceleration, between surviving an innings and shaping it.
Because what is at stake here is not just a cap, but the story the IPL chooses to tell about batting excellence.
Right now, that story privileges accumulation over intervention, longevity over urgency. It tells us who scored the most, but not necessarily whose contributions mattered most. The Orange Cap does not need to disappear. But it does need to be understood for what it is: a measure of volume in a format increasingly defined by value.