4. Tours
Tours are the main part of the FTP NAT Manager job. There are 3 tours weeks per season, two OD and one T20. For seniors this occurs in Weeks 5, 8 (T20), 11 and for U20s it's Weeks 6, 9 (T20), 12.
I like to consider each tour its own cycle which spans 4 weeks. In short these are:
A - Bid for hosting rights
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. Bidding for hosting rights
The first part in the process is to bid for hosting rights. Each tour is hosted by a nation who bids for it, and that nation gets to choose the 3 pitches that matches get played on. At the start of the bidding week everyone gets an in game message reminding them it's time to bid. Clicking the tours button on the left of the home page gets us to the list of tours where we can see old squads, or in this case click the bid button to take us to the bidding screen.
And then we get to bid. Banked Rating points are apparently explained in
this post. I'll be honest I'm not 100% over how it all works and when I read the post I'm not convinced that the content provided is correct but this is all I have to work with.
On this page you can bid a certain amount of points, whoever bids the highest gets hosting rights and pitch combo. It locks at 00:00 the following Sunday and you can change it up as many times as you wish before then. My vibes suggest that anything above say 800 points is considered a big bid.
There's a few reasons to bid for a tour. Most commonly it's because you have certain strength you want to enhance, or certain weaknesses you want to avoid. It's also possible that you will bid to try and cause some chaos (e.g. pick a random assortment of pitches) which might make squad selection tougher. Another very small reason is simply that you want the games played in a certain timezone and not at a the worst possible time for you. If you want to spend more time during this week you can scout the 30 player squads of the other 5 teams in your division and see if there's anything worth targeting or not. With unlimited resources I would want our management team to do this, but the return on investment is quite small so scouting in this week is not anywhere near the top priority.
B. Squad Selection - courtesy of MuslimDave
The second part of the process is to select an 18-man touring squad from the available players. At the start of the selection week, all U20 Managers 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.
By now, the bidding rights winner and the selected pitches for the tour have been announced. In this instance, Bangladesh has won the hosting rights, with matches to be played on Crumbling, Dry, and Slow wickets. Our bowling selection will be based on these pitch conditions to maximise our chances of success.
A typical squad should include at least 7 batsmen, 2 wicket-keepers, and 9 bowlers (where there's as many All Rounders as possible among those 9). U20 squads often change, so make the best use of available players. If you don't have 7 solid batsmen but have 3 decent wicket-keepers, consider using one as a batsman, resulting in 6 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.
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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