Decoding PBKS' run in IPL 2023: Another season where inconsistency haunted Punjab Kings

Punjab Kings finished at the eighth spot in the IPL 2023 points table with six wins from eight games. They have not qualified for the playoffs since IPL 2014.

Punjab's top performers were captain Shikhar Dhawan (373 runs) with the bat and Arshdeep Singh (17 wickets) with the ball in hand. Nonetheless, their miseries can be known from the fact that both Dhawan and Arshdeep were not part of the top-ten in the list of most runs and wickets, respectively. Punjab paid a heavy price for their expensive foreign buys such as Sam Curran, Liam Livingstone and Kagiso Rabada returning with below-par seasons. Livingstone did manage 279 runs, at 163.15 with two half-centuries, but he took time to get going.

Among their foreign recruits, Nathan Ellis was one of their most dependable performers -- ending with 13 wickets in ten games.

The season belonged to Prabhsimran Singh, Jitesh Sharma, etc. Dhawan and Arshdeep might have been the top-scorers of the side but Prabhsimran and Jitesh walked away with all the applause for their fearless strokeplay. Prabhsimran ended with 358 runs at an impressive strike rate of 150.42 with one hundred and a fifty. On the other hand, Jitesh's finishing skills were lauded left, right and centre as he ended with 309 runs at 156.06 including several impactful knocks down the order. 

Punjab Kings had a strange run. Interestingly, they won a game each versus the top-four teams -- beating Chennai Super Kings (CSK), Lucknow Super Giants (LSG) and Mumbai Indians (MI) in their home grounds -- but still managed to end in the bottom-half. They never managed to win more than two games in a row and paid a heavy price for their inconsistency. 

After Punjab's last league game in IPL 2023, Dhawan told the broadcasters, "Sometimes the batting was clicking, and sometimes the bowling was clicking, we couldn't put up those performances together. But it's a young group, so we have learnt a lot of things this season."

In a nutshell, Punjab were always behind given some of their big names fell flat, Dhawan was not at his dominating best all throughout, moreover, they failed to come up with collective performances and some of their tactics were bizarre, to say the least.