How to draft a side that actually wins

Drafting well is worth about ten percentage points of win rate and roughly doubles how often you take the title. Here is where the difference comes from.

Every draft is the same shape: a real squad is dealt, you take one player from it, and you do that until your eleven is full. What follows is drawn from running that process thousands of times and playing the seasons out.

The overall rating is the wrong thing to maximise

It is the obvious number and it is the most misleading one. A rating is impact per match, so an all-rounder who bats a bit and bowls a bit outranks a specialist who does one thing very well. An eleven built by taking the highest number on offer every time ends up with seven players who are good at both and nobody who is outstanding at either.

The engine plays each delivery as a contest between a bowler and a batter. A top order of 85-rated batters scores more than a top order of 88-rated all-rounders, because what is being tested on each ball is batting, not general worth.

Your attack matters more than your batting

A good attack is worth between 62 and 132 runs against the same batting side, measured across thousands of innings. That is a larger swing than almost any batting decision you can make, and bowlers are the slots people fill last and most carelessly.

The fourth and fifth bowlers are where seasons are lost. A side with three excellent bowlers and two who leak runs gets picked apart in the overs the weak ones bowl, and there is no way to hide them: the quotas mean everybody bowls.

Read the surface before you take the spinner

Pitch types are drawn per match, and every batter carries a separate rating against pace and against spin. Forty-six per cent of players differ by eight points or more between the two, so a side full of players who cannot handle spin has a real and specific problem on a turning pitch.

The same is true from the other end: on a spinning surface your own spinners are worth about eighteen per cent more, so a balanced attack is worth more than a specialised one across a whole season of mixed pitches.

Season form against prime

Season form rates each player for the year on his card, so a lean season is a lean card. Prime rates everyone at his career best. Prime sounds easier and is not: your opponents are primed too, and the field compresses, so the same draft wins fewer matches in prime than in season form.

Measured across forty seasons apiece, a strong draft takes the T20 League title about fifteen times in forty under season form and eight in forty under prime. If you want the harder game, prime is it.

When the squad in front of you is thin

• Take the slot you cannot fill later. Keepers and specialist spinners are scarce. A brilliant fourth batter is worth less than an adequate keeper if the keeper slot ends up empty.
• Prefer a specialist for a specialist slot. An all-rounder placed at number three is being asked to do the job of a batter, and his rating was earned partly with the ball.
• Do not chase a name. A great player in a poor season is a poor card, and the card is what plays.

What the difference actually amounts to

The Twenty20 World Cup is the hardest to win and always will be. Seven group games is not enough cricket for the better side to be proved better, which is close to the reason the format was invented.