Before 400 became conceivable and 300 became ordinary, there was a version of one-day cricket where 250 gave you something to bowl at. Was the cricket actually better- or do we just remember it that way?
Research cut-off: 26 August 2026
The verdict before the nostalgia
Let me get the confession out of the way. I miss the old one-day game.
I miss 247 for 8 looking like a total rather than an administrative error. I miss a captain defending 23 from the last three overs without everyone assuming he had already cocked it up. I miss the peculiar tension of an innings sitting at 132 for 3 after 30 overs, apparently doing nothing, while both sides understood perfectly well that the match was being negotiated.
But nostalgia is a magnificent liar.
It airbrushes the tedious games, keeps the thrillers, adds a little Channel Nine commentary in the background and hands the whole thing back to you in better condition than you originally experienced it.
So the question is not whether the ODIs of my childhood felt different.
They were different.
The more interesting question is whether they were better.
And the numbers give us an answer that is considerably less comfortable than nostalgia would like.
In the 1980s, the average first-innings ODI score was about 223. In the 1990s it rose to 233. By the 2010s it was 267. At the same time, teams became more, not less, willing to be bowled out: roughly 20 per cent of first innings in the 1980s, 24 per cent in the 1990s and 33 per cent in the 2010s.
That is the first clue.
Modern ODI batting didn’t simply become better at accumulating runs.
It became better at spending wickets.
And that changed everything.
1. When 250 had teeth
Take yourself back to the 1990s.
Not the highlights package. The actual cricket.
The fielding restrictions gave the batting side an opportunity early, but once those restrictions ended, the field could spread. Under the late-1990s ODI playing conditions, only two fielders were permitted outside the 30-yard circle during the first 15 overs. After that, the fielding captain could station five outside.
That created a very particular geometry.
Attack early.
Survive the middle.
Launch late.
Except the word launch needs historical context. A late-innings assault in 1997 did not necessarily mean 110 from the final ten.
Sometimes it meant 75.
And 75 was plenty.
The great tactical breakthrough of the 1990s was recognising that those first 15 overs could be exploited. Martin Crowe’s New Zealand sent Mark Greatbatch after the bowling during the 1992 World Cup. Sri Lanka then turned aggression into doctrine with Sanath Jayasuriya and Romesh Kaluwitharana in 1996. ESPN’s historical analysis notes that 1996 was the first year in which ODI openers collectively scored faster than batters at Nos. 3 and 4.
That was revolutionary.
But revolutions eventually become administration.
Once the field went back, so did the risk.
The middle overs became the domain of nudges, sweeps, singles into the leg side and batters who understood that a wicket retained was an asset that could be liquidated later.
This was the world of Michael Bevan.
And this is important, because we sometimes remember the old ODI as if everyone was trying to score quickly but simply wasn’t very good at it.
They weren’t.
They were solving a different optimisation problem.
The prevailing logic was that wickets were precious and overs plentiful. Losing your sixth wicket in the 35th over could destroy an innings. Arriving at the 40th with seven wickets standing gave you permission to attack.
So 250 wasn’t magical.
It was the output of the prevailing economics of an ODI innings.
2. Then cricket discovered that wickets were being hoarded
Here is the uncomfortable bit for those of us who loved that game.
A lot of those wickets were being wasted.
A team has ten wickets available across 300 legal deliveries. If it finishes 247 for 5, it has not necessarily demonstrated admirable responsibility.
It may have left resources unused.
Modern white-ball cricket became increasingly ruthless about that inefficiency.
The evidence is everywhere.
Historical ODI data shows the global batting strike rate rising from 68.07 in 1990 to 76.40 in 1998, then into the high 70s and above 80 by the late 2000s.
Boundaries became a larger component of scoring too. ICC’s retrospective on the first 40 years of ODI cricket found that boundaries accounted for about 35.2 per cent of runs off the bat in the 1980s, 37.2 per cent in the 1990s, and 44.6 per cent in the 2000s.
The six, in particular, changed status.
It stopped being an event and became a scoring option.
And the middle overs eventually followed.
An ESPN analysis comparing the early 2000s with the early 2020s found that during overs 11–40, a six went from roughly once every 150 balls to once every 60. Intriguingly, fours barely changed- from one every 16.4 balls to one every 15.3 and non-boundary scoring remained broadly similar.
That tells us something profound about modern ODI batting.
The revolution wasn’t merely that everybody learned to rotate strike better.
They learned to access the boundary without waiting for permission.
A spinner with four men back was once a signal to take the single.
Now it can be an invitation to hit into the fifth gap- vertically.
T20 accelerated that education. Batters developed ramps, switch-hits, better range against spin, stronger power-hitting mechanics and, perhaps most importantly, a different relationship with dismissal.
Getting out attacking ceased to be evidence that the attack had been wrong.
Sometimes it was simply the cost of doing business.
That philosophical change may matter as much as any bat.
3. The administrators helped
We cannot tell this story as a heroic tale of batting evolution while pretending the laws remained stationary.
They didn’t.
ODI cricket has been repeatedly redesigned.
In 2005, the old 15-over restriction was replaced by a ten-over opening phase plus two additional five-over Powerplays, an attempt to break the middle-overs stalemate.
Then came more intervention.
From October 2011, ODIs used two new balls, one from each end. That meant each ball aged for only half the innings rather than one ball grinding through almost all 50 overs.
The consequences were complicated.
Two newer balls could aid seamers early. But they also made the traditional art of manipulating an old white ball harder to sustain. Reverse swing became more difficult to access consistently. Spinners had less opportunity to work with a heavily worn ball.
Then the fielding rules shifted again.
The ICC later moved to a system in which only four fielders could be outside the circle during the middle phase, before allowing five outside during the final ten overs. The governing body itself described earlier changes as attempts to make ODI cricket more attacking and specifically noted increases in boundaries and wickets.
This matters because scoring inflation is never one thing.
It is tempting to point at modern bats and say: there you go.
Certainly equipment improved.
Players became stronger.
Boundary-hitting became a specialised skill.
T20 supplied a laboratory in which batters could practise previously ridiculous ideas until they stopped being ridiculous.
But the regulatory environment also encouraged aggression.
The game didn’t merely produce more aggressive batters.
It repeatedly changed its architecture to make aggression more viable.
And then, inevitably, batters became better at exploiting the architecture than administrators had anticipated.
Cricket has been doing this for 150 years.
Change the problem. Give players five years. Watch them break the solution.
4. What happened to the middle overs?
This, more than anything, is where my nostalgia lives.
Overs 20 to 40 used to have a rhythm.
A spinner came on.
The keeper stood up.
Long-on and long-off went back.
Someone made 34 from 51 balls and you thought he had batted rather sensibly.
There was tactical texture in that. But there was also dead air.
By the early 2000s the problem had become obvious enough for the ICC to start tinkering specifically with the middle of the innings. Its later Powerplay experiments were explicitly intended to disrupt the settled pattern that developed once the opening restrictions ended.
And this is where the old ODI’s defenders need to be fair.
Not every 250 was a masterpiece of tension.
Sometimes 250 happened because two teams spent 20 overs politely exchanging singles.
There were overs that contained four singles and absolutely no meaningful attempt by either side to alter the equation.
A batter nudged one to long-on.
The bowler walked back.
The commentator discussed the dew.
Repeat.
We remember the tension because the best matches converted accumulation into a close finish.
But plenty didn’t.
Modern ODI cricket has tried to remove those low-information passages.
It has succeeded. Perhaps too well.
Because once batters learned that the middle overs could be attacked, the format’s old three-act structure began to blur.
The opening assault no longer had to stop.
The consolidation phase no longer required much consolidating.
And the death overs became less a dramatic gear change than another acceleration from a car already doing 130.
That is more efficient cricket. I’m not convinced it is always better theatre.
5. Was 250 actually better?
Here is the strongest case for modern ODIs.
The batting is better. Not aesthetically- functionally.
Players have a wider range of scoring options. They hit good balls for boundaries more often. They understand match-ups. They use crease depth, angles and premeditation with a sophistication that would have looked mildly deranged thirty years ago.
Teams are also more rational about wickets.
The rise in first-innings scores alongside the rise in the proportion of teams being bowled out is not evidence of recklessness. It is evidence that teams increasingly understand a basic truth:
Ten wickets are resources, not heirlooms.
If 290 for 9 wins more often than 255 for 4, the four surviving wickets have no sentimental value.
That is the strongest rebuttal to my entire argument.
The modern ODI is, in many respects, a more highly evolved sporting contest.
But sport is not an optimisation spreadsheet. It is entertainment built from uncertainty.
And the old 250 game had one enormous advantage.
Runs were scarcer, so each run carried more information.
A boundary mattered more. A maiden mattered more.
A wicket could alter the entire shape of the chase.
If a side needed 74 from the final ten with six wickets standing, you did not automatically know which way the game was heading.
The equation lived.
Modern scoring can create spectacular matches, but abundance changes the emotional value of a run.
When 350 becomes chaseable, 280 loses menace.
When 20 from an over is routine, a four becomes punctuation rather than plot.
This is not an argument against skill. It is an argument about scarcity.
Football understands it instinctively. Goals matter because there aren’t 40 of them.
Test cricket understands it too. A single wicket can echo through two days.
The old ODI occasionally understood it by accident.
6. So bring back 250?
No. That would be nostalgia doing policy.
You cannot uninvent the ramp shot. You cannot ask Heinrich Klaasen to pretend he has never seen a T20. You cannot hand modern batters 1996 tactical knowledge and expect them to produce 1996 scoring rates.
Nor should we want to.
The old ODI had flaws that memory conveniently edits out.
There were stagnant middle overs. There were teams that conserved wickets far beyond their useful life.
There were chases that died at 30 overs and then continued for another hour and a half. There was plenty of ordinary cricket hidden between the classics.
But administrators should understand what was lost as scoring increased.
The answer is not necessarily fewer runs.
It is competitive tension across more of the innings.
Interestingly, the ICC has already moved again. Under playing-condition changes announced in 2025, ODIs use two new balls for the first 34 overs before the fielding side chooses one of them to continue with for the final 16.
That is an attempt to let the ball age again.
Good.
Because the best ODI cricket has never been about selecting an ideal total from a menu.
It is about ensuring that batting ambition carries enough risk for bowling skill to matter.
If that equilibrium produces 317, wonderful. If it produces 241, even better.
Just make the 241 dangerous.
So was one-day cricket better when 250 was a proper score?
Sometimes.
But not because 250 possessed some sacred cricketing virtue.
It was better when the conditions made 250 uncertain.
When a side could scratch its way there, walk off believing it had something, and then spend three and a half hours discovering whether it was enough.
That is what I miss.
Not defensive batting. Not 72 strike rates.
Not the obligatory 17-over partnership in which everybody behaved themselves.
I miss the jeopardy.
The old ODI forced you to wait longer for its violence. That waiting could be tedious, but it also created contrast. The quiet overs gave the loud ones somewhere to go.
Modern cricket has solved many of the old game’s inefficiencies.
Perhaps it has solved a little of its suspense as well.
And that is why those of us raised on one-day cricket can look at 250 for 8 and still feel something.
Not because cricket was automatically better then.
Because once upon a time, 250 wasn’t the end of the batting innings.
It was the beginning of the argument.
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