4. Tours
Tours are the main part of the FTP NAT Manager job. There are 3 tour weeks per season which occur in weeks 5, 8 and 11 for both Seniors and U20. The first season of your cycle will go T20/OD/T20, the second will go OD/T20/OD.
I like to consider each tour its own cycle which spans 4 weeks. In short these are:
A - Home Pitch Selection
B - Squad selection
C - Scouting opposition
D - Managing tour week matches
Outside of the last one, the rest of these can be as little as a 5 minute task, but if you really want to you can take a lot more time into it. I'll give a breakdown on each of these 4 weeks now.
A. Home Pitch Selections
This is a new part to NAT management.
Prior to each tour each nation gets to pick their home pitch for the tour. In a tour week you will have 2 or 3 home games and these home games will be played on your chosen pitch. Your opponents will do the same and your away matches will be played on their pitches. Your opponents for the tour are known before locking in your home pitch.
Note: The "Date Ready" section is not relevant here, you just have to select the pitch before the required time.
B. Squad Selection - courtesy of MuslimDave
The second part of the process is to select a 20-player touring squad from the available players. At the start of the selection week, all Managers/Assistants receive an in-game message reminding them to finalise their squads. The squad locks at 00:00 the following Sunday, and changes can be made until then.
At this point you will know the pitches for the 5 or 6 matches you have to play in the tour week. Choosing players who best suit the conditions is naturally advised. For example if your home pitch is a Dry with 3 home matches and your two away games are on a Slow and Crumbling, then consider touring more spinners to take advantage of the spinning pitches.
A typical squad should include 8 batsmen, 2 wicket-keepers, and 10 bowlers (where there's as many All Rounders as possible among those 10). U20 squads often change, so make the best use of available players. If you don't have 8 solid batsmen but have 3 decent wicket-keepers, consider using one as a batsman, resulting in 7 batsmen and 3 wicket-keepers. This should be a last resort, as 7 specialist batsmen are preferred. Ideally, include at least 1 all-rounder for lower-order depth, 2 all-rounders are better for managing fatigue. If only one all-rounder is available, consider bowlers who can bat a little.
Note: For U20s the maximum age a player can be the week you are finalising your squad is 20.14. This means they play the tour week at 21.01.
C. Scouting/Waiting/Preparation week
Sunday 00:00 is when tour squads will finalise, and you'll then be able to do/see the following:
- What pitch your matches are on each day, along with who your opponents are
- The fixture list for the week
- The tour squads of your opponents
Anything you choose to do during this week is technically optional, but here's a list of things that you could do:
- Set default orders and save them for Day 1.
- Take a look and see what the squad compositions are of your opponents.
- Map out a rough plan for your squad rotation throughout the week.
You could also take the entire week off, rock up on Monday and set orders day by day.
D. Managing tour week matches
So, you've made it to tour week, but now what? "It depends", is obviously a big answer to this, but lets outline a few things which you need to know.
There's 5 matches, all at the same time each day. The pitches are pre-determined and locked (see above), and the weather will be local time to the host nation and will change at the time listed in the schedule.
But Fatigue, that's a lot different....
- NAT Fatigue is a separate model to club fatigue, so all players start a NAT week with rested NAT Fatigue. A quick club sidenote means that you can give players about to tour an extra match or two the week before, as the fatigue will naturally recovery from having a week with no matches.
- Each day, a double fatigue update is run. So you'll see players recover from their matches twice as quickly as they would had they just had the exact same performance in a club game.
- The fatigue update runs 8 hours after the matches start. Note that this does not line up with the schedule.
So how do you realistically run and rotate a squad in tour week? The pitch draw will naturally dictate a lot, but for the moment lets assume you've toured a standard squad (7 bats, 2 WK, 9 bowlers) and we will do some maths behind this.
Rotation:
- Each day you need to pick 5 bats, that's 25 bats for the week. With 7 bats on tour, that means our 7 batsmen play 4, 4, 4, 4, 3, 3, 3 matches each.
- For wicketkeepers it's a lot easier. 5 WKs for the week, so it's 3 and 2 matches each. The WK with 2 can play a 3rd as a bat only however.
- For bowlers we need to pick 5 every day, so that is 25 spots for 9 bowlers. Which means it's 3, 3, 3, 3, 3, 3, 3, 2, 2.
In practise, if you give everyone a game in the first two days, then the teams mostly pick themselves after that (the least fatigued ones will stand out). It gets more complex as you choose to target specific matches for the different bowlers, maybe being less optimal on the fatigue front to get the bowler splits correct.
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