Cricket Captain 2018 – Domestic One Day and One Day International Match Types

A guide to improving your results in the OD formats.

Other Cricket Captain 2018 Guides:

• Cricket Captain 2018 – Developing Youth Players
• Cricket Captain 2018 – First Class and Test Match Guide

PAR Scores

Usually the ‘par’ score depends on the weather and pitch. You usually want to bat first and there are some general principles to follow. But what is a ‘par’? Well, a par score is the score you should be reaching to ‘win’ a game or keep it competetive. Statistical analysis from the Telegraph suggests that a score of 264 runs will give you 50% chance of winning the game, a score of 300 will win you the game 88% of the time and if you did badly enough to drop to 200 runs? 2.5 (that’s two POINT five) % chance of a win.

Opening batting powerplay

Myth: We should be scoring 100 in the first ten. Fact: The average opening powerplay score is around 42. The ideal thing for your openers to do is score 42-0, if you do that, you should usually be pushing on to 290+ runs and a whooping 70% chance of a victory. The more wickets you lose in the first ten, the lower your total is likely to be, with one telling stat, if you lose THREE wickets in the first ten you’re more likely to score 200- and rarely will you push 250+, essentially, you’ve lost the game, barring some miraculous effort from one of your batsmen.

The Final 10 overs

Wickets in hand is the major factor of how many runs you will be likely to score, if you’re lucky enough to get to the final 10 overs with 9 wickets in hand you’ll be looking to hit 130+ runs minimum. 8-7 wickets in hand will get you around 90 runs, but if you’re 5 down? You could have lost 20 runs here as the average is roughly 75 runs.

Overview

Don’t be so keen to score at 5-6 an over, it is within your interest to build a platform for the first ten overs and bat with settled batsmen up until you need to score lots of runs. How does this translate to Cricket Captain’s aggression settings? I would say 3-4 aggression for the first ten overs will get the players roughly 40 runs (4 is preferred), and for the rest of the time, just bat at 5 aggression. Then when the next powerplay comes along you can up it to 6 aggression and when the final ’10’ is there, that’s when you can go maximum as you’ll have wickets in hand (in an ideal world). However, you’ll have to judge whether they are batting too slow for your liking, there’s no excuse for plodding along at 2 an over, but don’t expect them to be smashing it for 6-8 an over either!

In my experience the best way of playing OD games is to play ball-by-ball when batting, this means you can get an early boundary and then ease off the batting aggression and thus reduce the wicket chance.