How to pace a run chase in cricket: the two resources

The moment the first innings ends, cricket stops being an open-ended game and becomes a problem with a stated answer. A target, a number of balls, ten wickets. Everything a chasing side does for the next three hours or the next two days is an attempt to spend two resources so that neither runs out before the runs do.

Knowing how to pace a run chase in cricket is therefore not a matter of nerve, or of wanting it more, or of any of the other things the coverage reaches for when a chase goes wrong. It is a resource allocation problem, the only genuinely calculable situation in the sport, and it is got wrong at every level of the game for reasons that are almost always structural rather than temperamental.

The first thing to fix is the instrument everybody watches.

Two resources, and only one of them is on the scoreboard

A batting side chasing a target has exactly two things to spend: deliveries and wickets. Runs are the output. Everything else, the conditions, the match-ups, the field settings, changes the exchange rate between the two inputs but never adds a third.

The scoreboard shows both, but it only makes one of them feel urgent. Overs remaining tick down visibly and the required rate is recalculated after every ball, so the balls resource is on constant display. Wickets sit as a small number after a slash and change perhaps six times in an innings. The result is a systematic bias in how amateur sides, and a surprising number of professional ones, read a chase: the resource that is displayed dynamically gets managed, and the resource that sits still gets forgotten until it is nearly gone.

The second correction is that the two resources are not independent, and the wicket resource is not linear.

A wicket is only worth what the remaining balls allow you to do with it. Lose a batter in the fifth over of a fifty-over chase and you have removed a set of attacking options from the next forty-five overs, along with the ability to absorb a second failure, and along with the option of accelerating hard at the death with somebody in hand. Lose a batter in the forty-ninth over and you have removed almost nothing, because there were barely any deliveries left to use him on.

That relationship is not a matter of opinion. It is formalised in the resource tables that sit behind rain-affected targets, which value a batting side's remaining position as a combination of balls left and wickets left, and in which the cost of losing a wicket falls steadily as the deliveries left fall. The full mechanism, and why the tables are shaped the way they are, is set out in the piece on how revised targets are actually calculated. For a chase, the practical version is a single sentence: early wickets are expensive, late wickets are cheap, and the price falls the whole way through.

The mirror image is just as important and gets far less attention. Unspent wickets are wasted resource. A side that finishes a twenty-over chase eight runs short with six wickets in hand did not lose because it batted badly. It lost because it declined to spend something it was given for free, and there is no prize for carrying batting into the dressing room.

• 120Balls in a completed twenty-over innings
• 300Balls in a completed fifty-over innings
• 10Maximum overs one bowler may send down in an ODI
• 5Fielders permitted outside the circle in the last ten overs of an ODI

These come from the Laws and from the ICC playing conditions rather than from any particular match, which is why they can be used as the frame for any chase in that format.

The required run rate is an average, and averages hide the thing that kills you

The required rate is runs still needed divided by overs still available. It is arithmetic, it is correct, and on its own it is one of the more misleading numbers in sport.

The problem is that it is a single average describing a set of deliveries that are not interchangeable. Six an over across the last ten overs of a fifty-over chase does not mean six an over is coming. It means the last ten overs contain a mixture: two overs from the fifth bowler that might go for twenty, four overs from a front-line seamer at the death that might go for eighteen between them, a spinner into a short boundary, and an over from whoever is left when the good bowlers are used up. A chasing side that plans against the average rather than against the distribution is planning against a match that will not be played.

So the required rate has four silences, and each of them has cost somebody a game.

It does not know how many wickets are left. Eight an over with seven wickets standing and eight an over with two are not remotely the same situation, and the number on the screen is identical.

It does not know who is bowling. Every captain in the world holds back his best bowler for the end. The overs remaining in a chase are not a uniform commodity, and the honest question is not what the required rate is but which overs the runs are coming from.

It does not know what the field is allowed to look like. In a fifty-over innings the number of fielders permitted outside the circle changes twice, and in a twenty-over innings it changes once, which means identical required rates in different phases present completely different problems. The phase rules and what each one is designed to produce are covered in the article on how the fielding restrictions work in each format.

And it does not know what the ball is doing. A required rate of seven against a hard new ball skidding on is a different proposition from a required rate of seven against a soft one gripping in the surface.

The instrument that beats it is cruder and better: runs needed, balls remaining, wickets standing, read as three numbers together and never one at a time. Balls rather than overs, because balls is the unit the batters are actually facing and it stops the mental rounding that makes a part-over look bigger or smaller than it is.

There is a fourth number worth carrying, and it is the one good chasing sides talk about in the middle. Not the required rate, but the number of deliveries you can afford to not score from. Chasing 181 in a twenty-over match means 181 from 120, which is 61 runs more than a single off every ball would produce. If a side scores singles from 90 balls and hits 30 balls for four, that is 90 plus 120, which is 210 and comfortable. Cut the boundary balls to 15 and the same 90 singles produce 150, and the chase is lost by a distance. The whole difference between those two outcomes is fifteen deliveries. That is a much more useful thing to hold in your head than a decimal that changes every thirty seconds.

What one maiden over actually costs

The lumpiness of a chase is most visible in what a single quiet over does to the requirement, and the answer changes enormously depending on when it happens.

231 needed off 40 overs0.15

176 needed off 30 overs0.2

118 needed off 20 overs0.31

60 needed off 10 overs0.67

30 needed off 5 overs1.5

Constructed arithmetic on an invented fifty-over chase, not measured data. At each point the side is assumed to be exactly level with the requirement; the figure is the increase in runs per over caused by six dot balls at that stage. The numbers are round so the division can be checked by hand.

Show the numbers

Worked example: the rise in required rate from one maiden over

Item	Value
231 needed off 40 overs	0.15
176 needed off 30 overs	0.2
118 needed off 20 overs	0.31
60 needed off 10 overs	0.67
30 needed off 5 overs	1.5

Ten times the damage in the last five overs as in the first ten of that constructed sequence, from exactly the same six deliveries. This is the arithmetic behind a piece of advice that sounds like folk wisdom and is not: get ahead early, because a run saved early is worth less than a run saved late, and therefore a run scored early costs the opposition less to concede and is easier to get.

It also explains the single most common tactical error in club cricket. A side chasing a modest target bats out the first fifteen overs at four an over, tells itself the rate is manageable, and discovers in the thirty-fifth over that manageable has become nine an over against the two best bowlers with the field spread. Nothing went wrong. The compounding was in the numbers all along and nobody was reading them.

Chasing in a Test match is a different sport with the same name

Everything above assumes a fixed number of deliveries. In a fourth-innings Test chase, that assumption disappears, and with it most of the framework.

A side batting last in a Test is not racing a ball count. It is racing a clock, in a match where three results are available rather than two, and where declining the chase entirely is a legitimate and often correct decision. The resources are overs remaining in the match, which is a minimum of ninety in a full day and a minimum of fifteen in the final hour, and wickets, and the third input that limited-overs cricket does not have: a pitch that is at its worst and getting worse.

Several things follow that do not apply anywhere else.

There is no required rate worth quoting on the fourth evening, because the target is not the only way to avoid defeat. A side needing 340 with five sessions left is not chasing 340 at 3.4 an over. It is deciding, session by session, whether the chase is live. The correct question at the start of each session is whether the wickets in hand still support the ambition, and the answer can change from yes to no in half an hour and back again the next morning.

The unit of planning is the session, not the over. A batting side sets itself a session target in the form of runs and wickets together, and the wickets half is the binding constraint. To bat through the last day at a manageable rate a side needs roughly a wicket per hour to spare, and once it is losing them faster than that the chase converts into a defensive innings whether anyone announces it or not.

Time can be given away deliberately. A fielding captain who thinks the draw is the danger will slow the game down; a batting side which has decided to survive will do the same. This is the only form of the game in which a chasing side benefits from the over rate being poor, which is a strange thing to see in a sport that spends so much effort penalising it.

And the surface is doing something no limited-overs pitch does. By the fourth and fifth days there are footmarks outside the right-hander's off stump, the bounce has gone uneven, the ball reverses because the square is dry and abrasive, and the fielding captain can set attacking fields all day because he has no run rate to protect. Fourth-innings targets are harder than the same number would be in the first innings, and every experienced player knows it in his bones even when the arithmetic looks benign.

Test chases fail in a way limited-overs chases do not, which is by running out of batters with the runs still available. That is the same collapse mechanism described below, arriving without any pressure from a required rate at all.

The fifty-over chase, and the change that moved the danger zone

A fifty-over chase is the format where the two resources are most nearly balanced. Three hundred balls is enough for a side to use most of its batting, so wickets carry real weight, and there is enough time for a bad first ten overs to be repaired.

The structure is fixed by the playing conditions rather than by preference. Ten overs of hard restriction at the start with only two fielders permitted outside the circle, thirty overs in the middle with four, and ten at the end with five. Ten overs maximum per bowler, which means at least five bowlers and, for most sides, a fifth bowler who is a part-timer and is therefore the most important ten overs on the card for a chasing team. Identifying whose overs those are, and making sure the set batters face them, is the single most transferable piece of chase planning in the fifty-over game.

20%44%23%13%

• Overs 1 to 10, two fielders out, no more than two wickets spent55
• Overs 11 to 34, four fielders out, rotating and picking off the fifth bowler125
• Overs 35 to 45, one ball only, set batter still in65
• Overs 46 to 50, five fielders out, wickets in hand deliberately unspent36

A constructed plan on an invented target, not a prediction and not measured data. The four blocks sum to the target exactly. The point is that the plan is written in runs per phase against a wicket budget, not as a single required rate.

Show the numbers

Worked example: one plan for chasing 281 in fifty overs

Item	Value
Overs 1 to 10, two fielders out, no more than two wickets spent	55
Overs 11 to 34, four fielders out, rotating and picking off the fifth bowler	125
Overs 35 to 45, one ball only, set batter still in	65
Overs 46 to 50, five fielders out, wickets in hand deliberately unspent	36

There is a genuine and recent change to the fifty-over game that alters where the risk sits in that plan. Men's one-day internationals used a new ball from each end for a full innings for many years, which meant that at the death the bowling side was working with a ball that was only twenty-five overs old: hard, still carrying its seam, and not reversing. From July 2025 the ICC playing conditions changed so that two balls are used to the end of the thirty-fourth over, after which the fielding side chooses one of them to use from both ends for the remaining overs.

The consequence for a chasing side is direct. The ball bowled in the last fifteen overs is now a great deal older than it used to be, which means it can go softer, grip more and reverse. The plan of leaving a hundred from the last ten with wickets in hand, which was the standard shape of a modern chase, is a slightly worse bet than it was, and the middle overs are correspondingly cheaper. Anyone building a chase around a late assault should now be asking what that one ball is going to be doing in the forty-third over, which is a question nobody had to ask when both balls arrived at the death half new.

The twenty-over chase, where the mistake is caution

A twenty-over chase inverts the problem, and the inversion is the thing most club sides never adjust to.

One hundred and twenty balls is not enough deliveries for ten wickets to be used. A side that loses five wickets and wins has spent its resources efficiently; a side that loses two and falls short has not. Wickets, in this format, are cheap in exactly the sense that matters: their marginal value is low because there are not enough balls to make them worth anything. The bottleneck is the ball count, and every plan should be built by asking how to convert balls into runs at the highest rate the wickets can support, rather than how to preserve wickets for a finish that will arrive with the game already gone.

That leads to a conclusion that feels wrong and is correct. Against a large target, a side with plenty of wickets standing should be attacking a large proportion of the deliveries it faces, and the fact that this raises the chance of being bowled out is a cost worth paying, because losing by eighty is worth exactly the same as losing by two. The scoreboard does not award partial credit and neither should the plan.

The other structural feature of the format is that only four overs per bowler are available, so a twenty-over innings contains at least five bowlers and usually a weak link. Six of the twenty overs come under the powerplay restriction and the rest are bowled with five fielders permitted outside the circle, which makes the difference between a boundary ball and a single enormous. The bowling side's counter-plan for the last five overs, and the specific skills it depends on, are dealt with in the piece on how sides bowl at the death.

One playing condition is worth knowing because it hands a chasing side a gift late on. In T20 internationals a fielding side that has fallen behind the required over rate must bring an extra fielder inside the circle for the remaining overs. A chasing team that is watching the clock as well as the scoreboard knows whether that is coming, and a batting pair that knows the field is about to shrink will plan the last few overs differently from one that does not.

Par score, and what a chasing side does with it

A par score is the first-innings total that would win about half the time on that ground in those conditions. It is a judgement rather than a measurement, assembled from the surface, the size of the boundaries, the weather, the time of day and what the first innings looked like from the middle rather than on the card.

The reason it matters is that it converts a target into a risk instruction, and the instruction is different in each direction.

If the target is comfortably below par, the chase will not be lost by scoring too slowly. It will be lost by a collapse. The correct plan is low variance: bat straight, take singles, refuse the risky option even when it is available, and let the arithmetic close the gap. Sides get this wrong by treating a below-par target as an opportunity to win with overs to spare, which is a prize that does not exist.

If the target is well above par, low-risk cricket cannot get there and playing it is a slower way of losing. The correct plan accepts a much higher chance of being bowled out cheaply in exchange for the only route to the win. This is where the difference between maximising the chance of winning and minimising the margin of defeat becomes a real decision, and where a captain's instructions have to be explicit, because a batter's instincts will always drift towards the respectable score.

Reading par is also where the toss decision comes from, and why so many captains in white-ball cricket now bat second by preference: a chasing side knows the number, and knowing the number is worth something in itself. Whether that preference is justified by conditions or is mostly habit is the subject of the piece on what the toss is actually worth.

The set batter has an obligation, and it is not to score fastest

Two batters in the same over are not equivalent. A batter who has faced thirty deliveries has calibrated the pace of the pitch, the size of the bounce, the pace off the surface after the ball has landed, and where the fielders are. A batter who has faced none has done none of that, and his first few balls are the least productive and most dangerous of anybody's innings.

The consequence for a chase is compounding rather than additive. A set batter who stays does not merely score at his own rate; he also protects the side from the repeated cost of a new arrival, and he keeps the option of a late assault in the hands of the person best equipped to deliver it. This is why the instruction to a set batter in a chase is nearly always the same, in every format and at every level: bat through. Not bat quickly, not bat sensibly. Be there.

Which raises the anchor question, and the honest answer is unpopular in both directions. An anchor is not automatically wrong. An anchor is a bet that his lower scoring rate is affordable because he will still be there at the end and someone else will make up the difference. The bet fails in one specific way: if the anchor's rate forces every other batter to score above the rate they can actually sustain, then his innings is not stabilising the chase, it is transferring the difficulty to people less able to handle it. The cost of an anchor is always paid by somebody else, and the way to judge one is not by his own strike rate but by what the required rate looked like for the man at the other end.

Two practical rules follow, and they are worth more than most of what gets said about chasing.

Give the new batter time, but not on the wrong bowler. Two or three overs of rotating the strike so he faces the least threatening bowling available is cheap. Shielding him for ten overs is not, because the required rate is compounding while you do it.

And the set batter takes the risk. When the moment comes to attack a specific over, the person who does it should be the one who is in, not the one who arrived four balls ago. A great many chases have been lost by a set batter pushing a single off the first ball of a crucial over and handing the problem to a man who has not yet seen the ball come off the pitch.

Hitting phases: acceleration is chosen, not smooth

A well-paced chase does not accelerate gradually. It is lumpy on purpose, and the lumps are chosen in advance.

The targets are overs, not moments. A chasing side identifies which overs it intends to take a disproportionate number of runs from: the part-time fifth bowler's spell, the over after a drinks break when a spinner is coming back, the two overs the weaker seamer has to bowl before the death, the first over with the field up. Then it manoeuvres the strike so the right batter faces them. Everything in between is rotation.

Field restrictions are the other trigger. The moment the number of permitted fielders outside the circle changes, the value of every shot changes with it, and a batting side that has not planned around those transitions is leaving runs on the table twice an innings.

The rule of thumb worth carrying is that a wicket in hand is a licence rather than a cushion. A side six down needing eight an over cannot attack, so its wickets have stopped being useful in the only way wickets can be useful. A side two down needing nine an over can attack, which is the entire point of having them. Wickets are not saved for the end, they are spent to buy licence in the middle, and the sides that misunderstand this are the ones that finish four down and thirty short.

Chases fail in clusters, and the reason is mechanical

The word applied to a collapse in a chase is usually a character judgement. The mechanism is a feedback loop, and it works the same way regardless of who is batting.

1. 1The required rate passes the comfortable rateUp to this point the runs can be taken with low-risk shots. Past it, somebody has to hit into a gap on purpose, against a field set for exactly that shot, and the risk stops being optional.
2. 2The set batter takes the risk, correctlyThis is the right decision and it still fails a good proportion of the time. The alternative, giving the strike to a new batter, fails more often, which is why the correct choice and the safe choice are not the same thing here.
3. 3A wicket fallsThe rate ticks up, and the far more expensive loss is the calibration that went with him. Whatever he knew about the pace of the pitch has left with him.
4. 4A new batter arrives needing runs immediatelyThe hardest situation in batting. His first few deliveries are the least productive of any innings, and the situation forbids him from spending them.
5. 5Dot balls arrive at the worst possible momentSix dots in the fortieth over of a fifty-over chase cost roughly four times what they cost in the tenth. The requirement jumps, and the jump was caused by the wicket rather than by anything the new batter did wrong.
6. 6The fielding captain closes the boundary optionsSensing it, he brings the field in for the single and pushes the sweepers to the areas the batter can reach. Low-risk scoring is now hard as well as insufficient.
7. 7The next batter walks into a worse equationHe faces a higher rate, a better field, a bowler with his tail up, and the same requirement to score from ball one. The second wicket in a collapse is more likely than the first, and the third more likely than the second.
8. 8The tail is exposed with the same requirementThe players least able to solve the problem inherit it in its hardest form. This is the point at which the margin of defeat starts to grow quickly and the scorecard begins to look like a rout.
9. 9Where the loop breaksOne over of deliberate consolidation, the set batter keeping the strike, or one targeted over against a weak bowler. All three cost runs in the short term and are cheaper than the alternative, and all three require someone to make a decision against the pressure of the scoreboard.

The sequence a chasing side falls into once the required rate passes what the batters can score at without risk. Each step makes the next step more likely, which is why wickets in a failing chase arrive in clusters rather than evenly.

Two things in that loop are worth pulling out.

The first is that the correlated risk is what makes collapses cluster. If each batter's dismissal were independent, wickets would arrive evenly. They do not, because every batter after the first is facing a harder version of the same problem, with a better field, a higher rate and less time. The reason a side loses four wickets for eleven runs is not that four players lost their nerve in the same fifteen minutes. It is that the fourth one was set an examination nobody could pass.

The second is that the chasing side has a source of pressure the first-innings side does not: a number to fail against. A team batting first that scores 240 finds out later whether that was enough. A team chasing 241 knows, at every single delivery, exactly how far short it currently is. That is a genuine asymmetry between the two innings and it is the reason the same players make different decisions in the two halves of the same match.

Conditions, and the one that decides most night matches

Everything above is the arithmetic. The exchange rate between wickets and runs is set by conditions, and four of them matter enough to plan around.

Dew. The most consequential and the least visible on television. In humid conditions under lights, dew settles on the outfield in the second innings, the ball becomes wet and heavy, the spinner cannot grip it and the seamer cannot hold his line, and the fielders drop what they would ordinarily hold. A chasing side that expects dew should plan to be alive and not necessarily ahead at the point it arrives, because the last ten overs will be materially easier than the first ten were. A chasing side that plans as though the conditions are constant across the innings is planning for a match that changes underneath it. The mechanism and how captains price it into the toss is the subject of what dew actually does to a night match.

The pitch across the innings. Surfaces are rarely stable. A dry pitch grips more in the second innings, so the middle overs get harder rather than easier. A pitch under lights can offer more seam movement in the evening. A slow, two-paced surface punishes a plan built on hitting through the line, and a chasing side that has watched the first innings has better information about this than anyone in the stands.

The boundaries. Grounds are not symmetrical and the square boundaries in particular can differ by a great deal, which changes which bowler is dangerous and which shot is worth playing. A chase planned around a specific short side is a real plan and is more common than the coverage suggests.

Rain. If interruption is likely, the chase changes shape entirely. A side that would otherwise bank on a late assault has to stay ahead of the revised-target par at every moment, because the match may simply end at an arbitrary point and be decided on where it stood. That converts a chase from an optimisation over the whole innings into an obligation to be ahead continuously, and it is one of the few situations where scoring quickly early is worth more than keeping wickets.

What a well-paced chase looks like from the outside

You can read the quality of a chase without knowing anything about the players, and none of the following requires the ball-by-ball record. It is all visible on the card and on the field.

The required rate never moves much. The single clearest signal of a well-paced chase is a required rate that sits in roughly the same place for thirty overs. A side that lets it climb to nine and then hauls it back to six twice has been lucky rather than good, and a side whose required rate falls steadily is usually one that has left runs behind and will discover it later.

Somebody is still in. Look for one batter who arrived early and is still there past the three-quarter mark. Almost every successful chase of any size has one, and almost every failed chase of a gettable target does not.

The wickets are spent, not lost. By the end of a good chase the wickets in hand should be low in a twenty-over game and moderate in a fifty-over one, and the last of them should have gone while attacking rather than while defending. Six wickets in hand at the end of a defeat is the clearest possible statement that a side did not use what it was given.

The bursts are against specific bowlers. Check whose overs the runs came from. If a chasing side has taken sixty from the ten overs of the two weakest bowlers, that is a plan being executed. If the runs are spread evenly across all five, it may simply have been a good pitch.

The last over of the fielding side's best bowler. Watch when the captain uses it. If he is forced to bowl it in the fortieth over because the chase is already running away, the chasing side has won the middle overs, which is where most chases are actually decided and where almost nobody is watching.

Read a chase that way and the shape of it appears well before the finish, which is the practical value of understanding the resources rather than the scoreboard. The rest of the sport, and the numbers underneath these decisions, is collected in the cricket archive, and the columns those chases eventually turn into are explained in the guide to reading a scorecard properly.