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Chasing wins 53% of NPL matches — and that is a smaller edge than you think

Everyone bowls first. The data says the advantage is real, marginal, and almost certainly over-weighted at the toss.

CricRhino Desk1 min read1 views
NPL — Chasing wins 53% of NPL matches — and that is a smaller edge than you think

Across 64 completed matches, the side batting second has won 53.1% of the games that produced a result.

The edge is real

53.1% is not noise across a corpus this size. Chasing genuinely is easier in the Nepal Premier League, and captains who bowl first are not making a mistake.

The edge is also small

53.1% means that for every hundred decided matches, chasing wins about six more than batting first. Put another way: 47% of the time, the team that batted first won anyway.

That is a very long way from the certainty implied by how consistently sides choose to field.

Why chasing helps here

The first-innings average is 147.5 — a gettable number that rarely puts a chase out of reach early. And the death overs run at 9.15, which means a chasing side that keeps wickets can leave a lot to the last four overs and still expect to get there.

What it should change

Not much, honestly. Bowl first if you win the toss; the numbers back you. But a captain who has a reason to bat — a specific matchup, a surface, an in-form top order — should feel free to. He is giving up six percentage points, not the match.

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Chasing wins 53% of NPL matches — and that is a smaller edge than you think · CricRhino