Required Run Rate, and Why Chases Collapse Guide

A required run rate is only two numbers dressed up as one: the runs still needed, divided by the overs still available. The overs figure comes from balls remaining divided by six, which is why the number is always quoted per over rather than per ball. An over is the unit cricket actually manages a chase in: it is when a bowling change happens, when the field resets, when a new batter settles in, so pricing the chase in overs matches how the innings is actually run rather than how a scoreboard ticks.

Say a side needs 90 more runs from 60 balls. That is 10 overs left, and 90 runs from 10 overs is a required rate of 9 an over. That number, on its own, says nothing about whether 9 an over is comfortable or desperate. It says only what has to happen, on average, across the balls that remain, for the total to be reached exactly on the last ball. It has no opinion on who is at the crease, what is left to come, or how the bowling is set up for the next ten overs. That is the whole of what the number is: an average of what remains, stated per over because overs are how the game is organised.

Two sides both needing 9 an over are not in comparable positions if one has three wickets in hand and the other has eight. The side with wickets in the bank can survive a quiet over or two without changing its plan, absorb a good spell from the opposition's best bowler, and cash in once the bowling changes. The side down to its last recognised batters has no such room: every further dismissal now costs an entire plan, not just a wicket, because a required rate that looked manageable becomes urgent the moment fewer overs and a thinner batting order have to make it up.

Required run rate cannot see any of that, because it is built from two inputs only: runs and balls. Wickets in hand is the other half of a chase's actual position, and any account of a run chase that quotes the rate without also saying how many wickets are left is describing half the match.

CricArcade's ODI archive holds 4493 completed two-innings matches decided on the original target, split across three eras: 1420 matches from 1971-1999, 1806 from 2000-2014, and 1267 from 2015-2026 to date. Two things move a great deal across those eras, and one thing barely moves at all. The average first-innings total rose from 219 to 240 to 254, and the share of first innings clearing 300 rose from 5.4% to 16.4% to 25.6%. Batting first got a great deal bigger. What barely moved is the chasing side's overall win rate: 50.4%, then 51.3%, then 50.8%, a band of about one percentage point spanning more than fifty years of the game.

Those two facts sit together because the eras are not comparing like with like. A 300 in the 1980s and a 300 in the 2020s are different asks relative to what a chasing side is used to facing, and sorted into first-innings bands the archive says so directly. A first innings of 300-324 was chased down 7.7% of the time in 1971-1999, from 52 matches; the same band was chased 15.7% of the time in 2000-2014 (159 matches), and 31.4% of the time in 2015-2026 (137 matches). The lower band of 250-274 shows the identical climb: 30.8%, then 37.9%, then 41.8%. Every specific size of target gets chased down more often as the eras go on, even while the chasing side's overall win rate holds almost still.

At the very top of the table the climb stops. The 380-999 band was chased 5.9% of the time in 2000-2014, from 17 matches, but the larger 2015-2026 sample of 42 matches sits at 0%. Beyond a certain total, a modern ODI chase has essentially never been completed in this archive, and the handful of chases above 380 that did succeed, covered below, are outliers rather than a trend line continuing upward.

None of the climb in the table above is because required run rate changed what it means. What changed is the game a chase is played inside. ICC playing conditions for One Day Internationals have mostly, though not only, shifted in the batting side's favour over the format's history, and two new balls per innings, standard since 2011, keep the ball harder and easier to hit through the innings than a single ball worn down by 50 overs. The archive cannot separate that cause from bat technology or shorter boundary preparation, since it only records outcomes, but the net effect is what the band table shows: the same first-innings total is a smaller relative ask in a later era than an earlier one.

A Test chase does not behave like this at all, because the fourth innings is not a race against a required rate so much as a race against a deteriorating pitch and the fielding side's best bowlers with the second new ball available again. Across 2537 Tests spanning 1877-03-15 to 2024-03-30, the archive holds 1301 decided fourth-innings chases, and the pattern by target band falls in almost a straight line.

A target of 1-149 was chased down 95.6% of the time. By 300-349 that has fallen to 19.3%, and at 350-999 it is down to 3.2%, from 406 decided matches. Only 4 fourth-innings chases above 400 have succeeded across the entire span of Test cricket in the archive.

An ODI chase degrades gradually as the target rises. A Test fourth innings degrades far more steeply, because time works against the batting side in a way it never does in a one-day match. A pitch that has taken four days of footmarks and wear turns and seams more than it did on the first morning, and the batting side cannot simply accelerate to beat a required rate the way a one-day side can, because there is usually no clock left to beat, only a worsening surface and the overs the fielding side has left to bowl at it. The archive's most recent Test is dated 2024-03-30, so this is a historical picture of the format rather than a current one.

Every band above has a small number of matches that beat it, and naming them shows what it actually costs to be one. In the ODI archive, 60 completed matches have produced a first innings of 380 or more, which is a target of 381 or more, and exactly one was won: South Africa's chase of 435 in Australia v South Africa, New Wanderers Stadium, 2006. Nothing else in the archive comes close. The next-highest successful chases sit a good way below it, at 372 and 370.

The Test record is a smaller number for a much harder reason. The highest successful fourth-innings chase in the archive is West Indies's 418 in Australia v West Indies, Antigua Recreation Ground, 2003, needing a pitch still playing true on the last day, which is itself the exception rather than the rule of a fourth innings.

It is worth being exact about what a wicket does to the rate, because the intuitive answer is wrong. A required rate is built from two inputs, runs still needed and balls remaining, and a wicket changes neither of them. A dot ball that takes a wicket pushes the rate up by precisely as much as a dot ball that does not. Nothing about the dismissal itself makes the arithmetic worse.

What a wicket destroys is the chasing side's capacity to score, and that is what the rate then records. There is one fewer recognised batter to come. The new arrival has to read the pitch and the bowling before playing freely, so the balls immediately after a dismissal tend to produce few runs, and it is those balls, not the wicket, that lift the rate. Meanwhile the batter still there has a choice that has got worse: attack with less protection behind, or push the problem into fewer overs.

That is why a collapse compounds. Each wicket buys a passage of quiet cricket, the quiet cricket raises the rate, the higher rate forces more risk, and the extra risk costs another wicket. It is a loop, not a single event, which is why a chase rarely fails gradually. It holds at a manageable rate for long stretches, then loses two or three wickets in a handful of overs, at which point a rate that was 7 an over with six wickets in hand can be 11 an over with two, and those are different sports.

A required run rate is an average, not a forecast. It cannot price in the bowler about to come back for a second spell, the boundary that is shorter on one side, or a batter who has looked in doubt all innings against the short ball. The band tables above describe outcomes across thousands of matches; they say nothing about the specific attack, ground or pitch in front of a chasing side on a given day, and should not be read as odds for any single match.

The archive has edges worth stating plainly. The ODI figures cover only matches decided on their original target, so rain-revised chases sit outside this count entirely, and the archive carries no Afghanistan fixtures after 2024-03-12, a source limitation rather than a form judgement on that side. The Test figures stop at 2024-03-30: nothing here describes a match played since. One reconciliation, since two pages on this site count the same archive: the ODI population here treats a tie as a decided match and so counts 43 of them, while our research piece on chasing 300 excludes ties and reports a slightly smaller population for that reason. The single innings of 350 or more that appears here and not there is West Indies against the Netherlands in 2023, a first innings of 374 that finished level and was settled in a one-over eliminator. What the numbers can tell you is the shape of the problem: how a rate is built, why wickets in hand change what it means, and how differently that plays out across two formats built on opposite clocks.

For the practical side of chasing a total, see how to chase a big ODI total and, for the extreme end of this guide's tables, can you chase 380. To follow a chase ball by ball rather than by rate alone, start with how to read a cricket scorecard, then take a chase yourself in The Chase.

• MCC Laws of Cricket, Law 17: the over
• ICC playing conditions for One Day Internationals (fielding restrictions, ball changes)
• CricArcade ODI match archive
• CricArcade Test match archive
• Figures computed with scripts/build-guide-facts.ts over the archive's scorecards

• 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.
• Can You Chase 380? The Scoring Ceiling and the Elite Floor: Why a 50-over total tops out near 380, how elite line-ups are protected from collapse, and what it actually takes to reach the top of the range.
• 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.
• Play The Chase, or browse every guide.