Can You Chase 380? The Scoring Ceiling and the Elite Floor Guide

A one-day innings runs 50 overs and 300 balls, and even a perfect line-up cannot score without limit. The game stays inside a believable band that tops out near 380. Real cricket has gone past that a handful of times, as the next section shows, but those innings are extreme outliers, and a simulation that produced them regularly would stop feeling like cricket. The natural pushers, the powerplay, the death, the run-rate urgency in the final overs, all lift scoring, but none of them lets a total run away to a fantasy 500. Reaching the top of that range is meant to feel like the ceiling of the format, because in almost every real match it is.

In the archive, 60 one-day internationals have seen a first-innings total of 380 or more. Against roughly 4,500 completed matches with a result, that is little more than one in a hundred. The highest of them are England's 498 for four against the Netherlands in 2022 and 481 for six against Australia in 2018, and both belong to a very recent style of batting: only one of the 60 came before 2000, 17 came between 2000 and 2014, and 42 have come since 2015.

Chasing such a total is rarer still. Only once has a side batting second overhauled 380: South Africa's 438 for nine against Australia in Johannesburg in 2006, after Australia had made 434. Every other side set 380 or more has lost. Even since 2015, sides chasing between 350 and 379 have won only about one match in six, and chasing 300 to 324 has succeeded less than a third of the time.

World Cups tell the same story. Seventeen times a side has batted first and made 380 or more at a World Cup, and sixteen of those sides won. The exception was decided by rain: New Zealand made 401 for six against Pakistan in Bengaluru in 2023, and Pakistan were ahead on the Duckworth-Lewis-Stern method when the match was called off. The closest anyone has come to chasing such a total is New Zealand's 383 for nine against Australia's 388 in Dharamsala at the same tournament, five runs short.

The largest successful chases in the archive share a shape. In Johannesburg, South Africa lost an early wicket and then added 187 for the second wicket, with Herschelle Gibbs making 175 from 111 balls. When India chased 360 against Australia in Jaipur in 2013, they lost one wicket all day: Shikhar Dhawan and Rohit Sharma put on 176 for the first wicket, and Virat Kohli made a hundred from 52 balls. England's chase of 361 in Barbados in 2019 rested on hundreds from Jason Roy and Joe Root, and they reached the last eight overs with only two wickets down. The exception that proves the rule is Australia's chase of 359 in Mohali in 2019: they were 12 for two before Usman Khawaja and Peter Handscomb rebuilt with a stand of 192, and Ashton Turner finished it with 84 not out from 43 balls.

In real cricket, the pattern is consistent: one very large partnership early, at least one batter scoring a hundred at better than a run a ball, and wickets in hand when the last ten overs begin. A chase of this size cannot survive a collapse in the first twenty overs, because the batters who come in later need a platform to attack from. That is the same logic the game follows below.

Getting near 380 needs three things to line up. First, a genuinely strong batting XI, because the whole innings takes its shape from your side's batting quality. Second, wickets in hand at the death: a full card slogs hard, while a side down to the tail simply cannot lift the rate no matter what the situation asks for. Third, a fast start and a middle that does not leak wickets, so you arrive at the death with a platform and the batting to cash it in. Lose early wickets and the ceiling drops out of reach no matter how good the names on the card.

The opposite limit matters too. A genuinely top-class batting line-up should not be bowled out absurdly cheaply, because in real cricket a great side rebuilds. In CricArcade an elite XI that is genuinely collapsing tends to steady itself, in a way that only ever makes wickets harder to take against class, never inflates the runs. Weak line-ups get none of this and can still be rolled cheaply.

There is also a middle-innings version of the same idea: after a cluster of quick wickets, a strong, sensible side plays with more care and rebuilds, while a weaker side keeps crumbling. Class shows up as resilience, not just as bigger hitting.

Try to build a side that can chase 380, and one that can defend it, in The Chase. Pacing the chase itself is covered in how to chase a big ODI total, and squad selection in how to draft a World Cup XI.

• CricArcade ODI match archive: every men's one-day international with a scorecard
• Figures compiled from the official match scorecards in CricArcade's archive

• How to Draft a World Cup XI: The roll-pick-skip mechanic behind The Chase, the six team templates, and what it actually takes to chase 380 without losing a wicket.
• How to Chase a Big ODI Total: Required run rate, wickets in hand, and pacing an innings across the powerplay, middle overs and death: why the team that panics first usually loses.
• ODI Powerplays, 1971 to Today: Field restrictions began as a fix for dead opening overs and have been rewritten roughly every decade. What each rewrite changed, and what the archive says it did to scoring and to wickets.
• Required Run Rate, and Why Chases Collapse: The arithmetic of a chase, why the rate alone misleads without wickets in hand, and what the ODI and Test archives say about which targets actually get chased down.
• Play The Chase, or browse every guide.