Why middling scores make for the best kind of ODI

Ah, the thrill of the big chase. The throbbing relentlessness of the pursuit, the sense of unremitting jeopardy, and the big hits, of course the big hits: the sight of the ball soaring into the sky or racing across the turf. A sense of improbability - let's soak it in while it lasts - slowly turning into anticipation, and then palpable expectation. How sweet is hope, and how it kills.

When the ride is done, if the match has gone the distance, you find yourself exhausted, having committed yourself raucously to each moment, to each swing in play, and depending on where your loyalty lies, feeling the warmest of glows or gutted at what could have been. And if you have been a neutral, feeling the privilege of having experienced something truly spectacular.

Whatever your stripes are, if you are a sports fan, the poignancy of the finish is never lost on you. So as you watch Jimmy Neesham, drafted into the New Zealand XI late, and batting in this World Cup for the first time, fall short in a desperate lunge for a second run, you are one with him in his despondency. That run would have kept him at the crease, and the hopes of his team, which he so valiantly boosted in the final overs, alive. As he lingers on his knees, head bowed, eyes shut, your mind casts back to that evening at Lord's in 2019 when Neesham was at the other end and Martin Guptill, his batting partner in that Super Over, found himself similarly stranded, to let a maiden World Cup Trophy slip from their grasp.

Here in Dharamsala, after the final ball is bowled and Australia scrape a five-run win, it is also not lost on you that in a match that yielded 771 runs, a World Cup record, a bowler has had the final say. Mitchell Starc ended the game as Australia's most profligate bowler, having given away 89 runs in nine overs without a wicket. But when it came to the reckoning, he would defend 13 off five balls, after giving away five wides with his second ball.

What a match. What a finish. The World Cup had finally burst to life. Two crackers in two days. About time.

But, but. The utopian ODI is also something of a miracle, and of the rarest kind. The reality is that once a team batting first has belted the ball into orbit, the chase often stays in orbit too, which makes for the most hollow of experiences. In most cases, the best approach to such games, like the one between South Africa and England, two alpha hitting teams (at least potentially) at a hitters' paradise like Wankhede, is to enjoy the batting spectacle in isolation. To watch Heinrich Klaasen and Marco Jansen that afternoon was breathtaking: even accounting for the heat and the way England wilted, the force and the majesty of the striking was jaw-dropping.

But as is often the norm with a team chasing nearly 400, the rest of the evening was a write-off, the biggest mercy being that England put themselves out of their misery in 22 overs, unlike Bangladesh's crawl a couple of days later against the same opponents, which lasted into the 47th over. T20 produces plenty of similarly one-sided contests too, but the agony plays out a lot longer in a one-day game that has been decided halfway into it.

That's why I am a fan of simmering thrillers. There is, of course, the vicarious thrill of a low score being defended - like Netherlands did against Bangladesh on the same day as the Australia-New Zealand runfest, and India did against England a day later - but it's the ODIs that produce middling scores, on pitches that don't reduce bowlers to run-servers, that appeal the most to me. Cue the other thriller from last week: South Africa's stuttering, nervy chase against Pakistan, where the No. 11 stoutly blocked out a few thunderbolts before the No. 9 secured the win with a deft shot.

It's a personal thing, but I find the feast to be wholesome when you can enjoy a wider range: attacking bowling and attacking batting; wickets that are earned and not gifted; hard-run twos, where the skill lies in guiding the ball into the gaps and not just in belting the lacquer out of it.

Texture makes ODIs richer and that's what the format has over T20s, which can become monochromatic. And of course, when the bowlers are in the game, the match usually stays a contest for longer.

That's why I found myself bristling a bit when it was suggested in certain quarters that the pitch in Chennai for the India-Australia game wasn't fit for one-day cricket. It might have been a corker had Australia knuckled down to get past 250, or had Mitchell Marsh held on to the miscued pull from Virat Kohli in the eighth over. As it was, India's chase was full of tension for nearly 30 overs. Batters eking out survival first and then striving to find runs can be far more absorbing than boundaries being hammered as birthright.

Don't take my word for it, statistics will bear out that huge first-innings scores usually produce the dullest contests. Not a single score of 350 or above has been chased down in ODIs since the start of the 2019 World Cup, which itself, contrary to hype and expectation before the tournament, was memorable for its low-scoring thrillers, including the final and one of the semi-finals.

Even if we take a generous margin of 25 runs as the cut-off to define a close game by, only four of the 29 games with 350-plus targets make the cut. That's a measly 14%. Reduce that score band to 300-324 and the number of close games rises to 40%.

The real sweet spot? Scores between 250 and 274. Not only do they produce a high percentage of close finishes (42.6%), but also nearly equal chances (49% to 51%) of the chasing or defending team winning.

It might sometimes feel like the ODI game is under siege - Test cricket has the heart of the connoisseur and T20 has the force of the zeitgeist - but ODIs can't muddle through an identity crisis and try to be more like the 20-over game. Instead, conditions must be created to allow it to be its best, most competitive self.