Where Does IPL 2022 Highest Wicket Taker Rank in All-Time Stats?

So today I decided to figure out where the dude who took the most wickets in IPL 2022 actually stands against all the big names from past seasons. Seemed straightforward, right? Yeah… not so much.

Starting Simple (And Getting Confused)

First thing I did was just search online for “IPL 2022 highest wicket taker”. Easy. Everyone was saying it was Yuzvendra Chahal for Rajasthan Royals – took 27 wickets. Okay, cool, got my target player.

Now for the messy part. I started looking up “all time highest wicket takers in IPL history”. Bam! Instant headache. Different sites, different lists, slight variations! Was Chahal even in the Top 10? Top 20? Hard to pin down. One big list I found had names like Lasith Malinga, Amit Mishra, Bhuvneshwar Kumar, Piyush Chawla, Dwayne Bravo way up there.

Chahal popped up somewhere in the teens on one list, maybe late 20s on another? Frustrating! This inconsistency online drove me nuts.

Taking Control with Data

Enough with unreliable lists. I remembered messing with some IPL data before. Found an old CSV file I downloaded ages ago – had player stats up to a certain point, like maybe 2021. Needed to update it for this.

Went back to where I originally got the data (one of those sports stats sites), found the updated version covering through IPL 2023, and grabbed that sucker.

• First hurdle: the file was huge and messy.
• Second hurdle: Needed to isolate bowlers and their total wickets.

Fired up Python, loaded Pandas:

import pandas as pd
ipl_data = *_csv('ipl_ball_by_ball_2008_*')

This dataset has every ball! To find total wickets per bowler? Needed to:

1. Group by bowler
2. Sum up their wickets (filtering where dismissal happened).

# Filter rows where 'dismissal_kind' isn't NaN (meaning a wicket fell)
wickets = ipl_data[ipl_data['dismissal_kind'].notnull()].copy()
# Now group by bowler & count those rows for each bowler
all_time_wicket_takers = *('bowler')['dismissal_kind'].count().reset_index()
all_time_wicket_*(columns={'dismissal_kind': 'total_wickets'}, inplace=True)

Focusing on 2022 Chahal

Now I had the big list! To find where Mr. 2022 Champ stood:

1. Sorted the entire list by `total_wickets`, descending.
2. Reset the index to get ranks.

all_time_wicket_*_values('total_wickets', ascending=False, inplace=True)
all_time_wicket_*_index(drop=True, inplace=True)  # Makes index start at 0
all_time_wicket_takers['all_time_rank'] = all_time_wicket_* + 1  # Index starts at 0, rank at 1

Finally, hunted down Chahal in this ranked list:

chahal_rank = all_time_wicket_takers[all_time_wicket_takers['bowler'] == 'Yuzvendra Chahal']
print(chahal_rank[['bowler', 'total_wickets', 'all_time_rank']])

The (Surprising?) Answer

Looking at the output… Well, I was kinda surprised! Based on my data up to 2023:

• Yuzvendra Chahal had around 187 total wickets at that point.
• His all-time rank was around 7th.

Higher than I expected after seeing those conflicting lists! Dudes like Bravo, Malinga, Mishra, Harbhajan, Chawla, and Bhuvi were still ahead of him. Solid, but not yet cracking that absolute top tier in terms of sheer longevity and volume.

So yeah, the 2022 highest wicket-taker finished that season on top, but sits comfortably within the Top 10 all-timers club, proving himself over the long haul. Good on him! Proved searching online wasn’t enough – had to dig into the raw numbers myself.