Strike rate gets the headlines. Economy rate gets the airtime on commentary. But neither tells you what actually matters in T20 cricket: whether a bowler is making life difficult for the batter on every single delivery.
The Pressure Index is Big Hit Cricket's answer to that problem. It's a single 0–100 score that captures three things at once — how often a bowler stops runs, how far below the average economy rate they operate, and how regularly they take wickets. Here's exactly how it's built and why it's more useful than any single stat on its own.
Why One Number? The Problem with Standard Bowling Stats
Economy rate is the default bowling metric. It's easy to understand: runs per over, lower is better. The problem is that it's reactive. Economy only tells you what happened after the ball was bowled. It doesn't tell you whether the batter was in control or scrambling.
A bowler with an economy of 8.0 might have achieved that by getting hit for one six and having five dot balls — that's a bowler applying real pressure. Or they might have given away singles on every ball with no dots and no threat. Same economy, completely different picture.
Dot ball percentage fixes part of that. Dot balls are the currency of T20 bowling: every time you stop a run, you tighten the required rate and put the batter under psychological pressure. CricViz data puts it clearly: teams restricting opponents to 40% or more dot balls win around 70% of the time. But dot % doesn't capture how economical you are on the balls that do go for runs, or whether you're actually taking wickets.
Wicket frequency fills yet another gap — but pure wickets per match ignores how many balls it took.
None of these metrics alone gives you the full picture. Pressure Index combines all three.
How the Pressure Index Is Calculated
The formula is transparent. There are three components, each contributing a weighted share of the final score.
Component 1 — Dot Ball % (40% weight)
The biggest slice of the score. Your dot ball percentage is simply the proportion of legal deliveries that result in zero runs: no singles, no boundaries, nothing.
Why a 40% weighting? Because limiting scoring opportunities is the foundation of bowling in T20. Before you can take a wicket, you need to make the batter do something they don't want to do. Consistent dot balls are the mechanism.
A dot ball % of 40% maps to a contribution of 40 points from this component alone. Most elite T20 bowlers sit between 35–45% in this column.
Component 2 — Economy vs Phase Benchmark (35% weight)
This is where the Pressure Index gets smarter than raw economy. Rather than measuring economy against a single fixed par line, the benchmark adjusts depending on which phase of the innings you're bowling in.
The benchmarks are:
- Powerplay (overs 1–6): 7.5 runs per over
- Middle overs (overs 7–15): 8.0 runs per over
- Death overs (overs 16–20): 10.0 runs per over
This matters because death-over bowling at 9.5 is exceptional — it's below the par line for that phase. But a powerplay economy of 9.5 is poor. Comparing every bowler against the same single number misrepresents what's actually hard.
The closer a bowler's economy is to zero (or below the benchmark), the closer this component gets to its maximum 35-point contribution. Exceed the benchmark and this component pulls the score down.
Component 3 — Wicket Frequency (25% weight)
A bowler who never takes wickets can't win you a T20 match, no matter how tight their economy. This component measures wickets per ball against a reference rate of one wicket per 20 balls (5%).
Hit that rate — a wicket every 20 deliveries — and you score the full 25 points from this component. Lower than that and it scales proportionally.
The 25% weighting reflects an important reality: wickets matter, but in T20, preventing runs is more consistently impactful than taking wickets. The weighting reflects what the data shows, not what feels right at face value.
Reading the Score
The final Pressure Index is a number between 0 and 100.
| Score | What it means |
|---|---|
| 70+ | Elite. This bowler is consistently making batters uncomfortable. |
| 55–69 | Very good. Above-average pressure across most games. |
| 40–54 | Average. Some pressure delivered, but gaps exist. |
| Below 40 | Below average. The batter is largely in control. |
These bands shift slightly by phase — a death bowler with a score of 65 has achieved something genuinely difficult given the conditions they operate in.
Phase Filtering Changes Everything
One of the most useful things you can do with Pressure Index is filter by phase. A bowler might look average across their full career but have an outstanding death-overs score. That's a specialist worth knowing about.
Jasprit Bumrah's career Pressure Index, filtered to death overs, places him in the top 15 death-over bowlers all-time across our entire database. The phase benchmark adjusts to 10.0 runs per over for those overs, so his ability to hold his economy around 7.8 in the death translates into a near-perfect component 2 score.
By contrast, a spin bowler who dominates middle overs might have a lower death score because they're rarely used there — and when they are, the conditions are different. Comparing the two without phase context is comparing apples to a different kind of apple.
What Pressure Index Is Not
It's a career or season metric. It's not designed to evaluate a single spell or even a single match. One bad over in a T20 can swing any metric dramatically — Pressure Index is built to show consistent patterns, not one-off events.
It also doesn't account for pitch conditions, opposition quality, or venue. A bowler maintaining a high Pressure Index at Wankhede or Chinnaswamy — among the higher-scoring IPL venues — is doing something harder than maintaining the same score at a lower-scoring ground. The metric gives you the number. Context is still your job.
Where to Find It
Pressure Index is available in the Stat Builder under bowling metrics. Filter by competition, phase, and time window to cut the data exactly how you want it. Player profiles also display the metric alongside economy and wicket frequency, so you can see it in context of everything else a bowler does.
If you're building a fantasy team for a death-overs specialist slot, sort by Pressure Index filtered to overs 16–20. If you want to know who the best powerplay bowler in the IPL has been over the last two years, same tool, different filter.
The data covers 9,600+ matches across 18 competitions. The metric is built on ball-by-ball records, not aggregates from scorecard scraping.
The Bottom Line
Economy rate tells you what happened. Dot ball % tells you how you made it happen. Wicket frequency tells you when you ended it. Pressure Index puts all three together into a single number you can actually use.
No metric is the complete picture. But Pressure Index gets closer than anything else we've seen in publicly available T20 analytics.
Explore it in the Stat Builder →