Why Your 99-Rated Star Still Gets Out Guide

The very best batters in the world's history still average in the 50s and 60s in Tests and get out for single figures a good share of the time. The nature of cricket is that a good ball, a sharp catch, a moment's lapse or a small misread of the surface can dismiss anyone. A player who could not be dismissed would not be a cricketer.

Take the batters in the Test archive with at least 50 innings and 40 dismissals, and rank them by average. Don Bradman is first, with 6,996 runs at 99.94, a figure no one else has come close to. Yet in the innings in which Bradman was dismissed, one in five ended with him on fewer than ten, and he made seven ducks, including one in his final Test innings.

The rest of the top of the list tells the same story more strongly. Herbert Sutcliffe averaged 60.73 and was out for under ten in 16% of his dismissals. Ken Barrington, at 58.67, did so in 22%. Everton Weekes, at 58.62, in 26%. Garry Sobers averaged 57.78 and made twelve ducks. These are the most reliable batters Test cricket has produced, and roughly one dismissal in five still came cheaply. In real cricket, greatness shows up in how often a batter goes on to a big score, not in never failing.

It is tempting to think a batter who is set becomes safe. The archive says otherwise. Across every Test innings on record, 15,316 reached fifty, and 21% of those ended before sixty. Of the 4,455 that reached a hundred, 19% ended before 110. The nineties, often called the most nervous stretch of an innings, are no worse: 17% of innings that reached ninety ended short of a hundred, as the guide to settling in explains. Getting in makes a batter more productive, but every new ball, every spell from a fresh bowler and every change of plan carries its own chance of a wicket, and those chances add up over a long innings.

In CricArcade, a batter at the crease faces exactly that: however well they are going, the next ball can still be the one. That is what keeps a big innings exciting to watch and a strong bowling side worth building.

T20 has its own version of the lesson. The four highest run totals in a single IPL season in CricArcade's player database are Virat Kohli's 973 in 2016, Shubman Gill's 890 in 2023, Jos Buttler's 863 in 2022 and David Warner's 848 in 2016. The following season, Kohli made 308 from ten innings, Gill 426, Buttler 392 and Warner 641. All four remained outstanding players. Their record seasons were the result of great form, good pitches, the right conditions and some luck arriving together, and the combination did not come back the next year.

That matters for a game built on real seasons. A peak season is a real record, and it deserves to be reflected. But it is also partly a product of things that will not repeat, which is why a simulation that treated the best season of a career as the player's normal level would overrate them.

CricArcade is built on the real career records of thousands of players, and peak seasons in T20 and ODI cricket can be extraordinary. If the engine simply took those peaks at face value and stacked them, an elite line-up would start producing individual innings that never happen in real cricket. Great players should be great, but not invincible, so the engine keeps the very top of the range anchored to what real cricket actually produces.

The important thing is that this preserves the ordering. A better season is still strictly better than a worse one; a higher rating is still strictly better than a lower one. Ordinary players and ordinary seasons behave exactly the way you would expect. The very best names in the game remain, comfortably, the very best names in the game.

The practical effect is that your superstar is still comfortably your most reliable batter, still the one you want facing the new ball or anchoring a chase, but they carry a real dismissal probability on every delivery. They get out to a good ball, a sharp catch, a moment's lapse, the same way the real player did. It keeps the game honest: a strong XI wins more, but no single name turns a match into a formality.

The other side of the same idea is that a genuinely top-class 50-over batting line-up will not be bowled out absurdly cheaply when things start to go wrong. A great side rebuilding after an early collapse is real cricket. Keep the extremes believable and leave the ordinary game untouched: that is the philosophy on both ends of the range.

How the underlying numbers are built is covered in how real careers become ratings. Put your best XI to the test in the T20 Franchise Manager or The Chase.

• CricArcade Test match archive: 2,537 Tests, 1877 to March 2024
• CricArcade IPL player database: season-by-season batting records
• Figures compiled from the official match scorecards in CricArcade's archive

• Why a Captain Matters: Bowling changes, fields at the death, and holding a side together in a chase: what a T20 captain actually decides, and why the vice-captaincy is a real choice.
• How IPL Auctions Work: Purse caps, retention and overseas-player limits: the mechanics behind a T20 franchise auction, and how the game puts you through the same calls.
• How Real Careers Become In-Game Ratings: Every player is built from real career numbers. How an average and a strike rate become a rating, and the trick that makes a higher rating actually buy survival.
• How a T20 Innings Is Modelled: Powerplay, middle and a death where everyone slogs: how 20 overs are shaped, calibrated to hundreds of thousands of real IPL deliveries.
• Play T20 Franchise Manager, or browse every guide.