2023 Indian Premier League

The 2023 Indian Premier League (also known as Tata IPL 2023 for sponsorship reasons and sometimes referred to as IPL 2023 or IPL 16) was the 16th season of the Indian Premier League, a franchise Twenty20 cricket league in India. It is organised by the Board of Control for Cricket in India.

In the final, Chennai Super Kings defeated Gujarat Titans, by five wickets (DLS method) to win their fifth league title.

Background
The league returned to its original home-and-away format after a four year hiatus. Due to the COVID-19 pandemic, the previous three seasons were held at neutral venues. "Fan parks" were organised in 45 cities, events which last occurred in 2019, and an opening ceremony took place for the first time with performances from Arijit Singh, Tamannaah Bhatia, and Rashmika Mandanna.

Format
The teams are divided into two groups (A and B) of five teams. Each team plays twice against all five teams in the other group (home and away), and once against all four of the teams in its own group. All teams play seven home and seven away games.

Rules
A number of new laws have been introduced in this season:
 * A penalty of five runs if unfair movement by a fielder or wicketkeeper occurs as a ball being delivered and before it is received by the batsman. The dead ball will also be declared.
 * Teams can be declared after the toss.
 * An "Impact Player" rule allowing sides to substitute a player during a match from four named substitutes.
 * If a team fails to bowl their 20 overs in the allocated time, only four fielders will be allowed outside of the fielding restrictions circle for the remainder of the innings.
 * Teams can review balls for wides and no-balls using the Decision Review System (DRS). This change was first used during the 2023 Women's Premier League.

Participating teams
The same 10 teams from the previous season returned with few changes to the team personnel.

Personnel changes
In August 2022, Chandrakant Pandit replaced Brendon McCullum as head coach of Kolkata Knight Riders. In September Mumbai Indians promoted Mahela Jayawardene to a strategic role in the franchise and recruited Mark Boucher as head coach for 2023. In November, Tom Moody was replaced by Brian Lara as head coach of Sunrisers Hyderabad. On 16 September 2022 Anil Kumble was also replaced by Trevor Bayliss as head coach of Punjab Kings.

In November 2022, Shikhar Dhawan replaced Mayank Agarwal as the captain of Punjab Kings.

The IPL auction took place on 23 December 2022 in Kochi. The most expensive player was Sam Curran, bought by Punjab Kings for inr 185000000, the most paid for a player in the history of the league.

Venues
The league stage was played at 12 stadiums in India.

In the playoffs phase, the first qualifier and eliminator matches were played at Chennai and the second qualifier and the final were played at Ahmedabad.

League stage
The schedule for the group stages was published on 17 February 2023.

Playoffs
The full schedule for the playoffs was announced on 21 April 2023.

Broadcasting
In June 2022, the broadcasting rights for the league between 2023 and 2027 were sold for inr 483900000000, establishing the league as the second most expensive tournament in the world after the National Football League, overtaking the English Premier League. Star Sports renewed its television contract, and Viacom18 acquired the digital rights within India; matches were streamed for free on JioCinema. The final peaked at over 32 million viewers on JioCinema, overtaking a match from the 2019 Cricket World Cup as the most concurrent viewers on a livestreaming event worldwide.

Slow over- rate
In this IPL season, matches took longer time to finish due to teams bowling at a slow over-rate. According to the IPL rules, an innings should be completed in 90 minutes, including two 5-minute strategic timeouts, and a complete match should be finished in stipulated 3 hours and 20 minutes. However, as of 5 April 2023, not a single innings had ended in the above-mentioned time frame. Despite penalizing team captains, the over rates have seen little improvement.

English cricketer Jos Buttler appealed on Twitter that the IPL matches should be sped up. Due to the slow over-rates of the various teams, this season's matches finished after 11:30 pm (IST). IPL evening matches are scheduled to start at 7:30 pm and, therefore, should be concluded by 10:50 pm.

Impact player rule
The 2023 season saw the introduction of the impact player rule which allowed for each team to provide a list of 5 players along with the list of their playing 11. Of these 5 designated players, any impact player could then be bought on to feature in the match.

Many cricket pundits criticised the new impact player rule because of the thought that this rule negates the role and involvement of all-rounders in the game.

Most runs

 * Orange Cap

Most wickets

 * Purple Cap

End of season awards

 * Source: Sportstar