Every player in 500/0 has three ratings out of 99. Together they tell you what a player brings to a chase, and reading them well is the difference between the 500 Club and a heartbreak finish.
| Rating | What it means |
|---|---|
| BAT | Batting, how good they are at building an innings and staying in. |
| POW | Power, scoring speed and the ability to clear the ropes and keep the rate up. |
| BWL | Bowling, how much they hold up with the ball. This is what your lower order lives or dies on. |
Ratings glow brighter the more elite they are, so you can read a player at a glance:
Each player is colour-coded by role, batter, all-rounder, bowler, wicketkeeper, so you can build the right shape. And the shape is strict: your top seven carry the batting and power, and your lower four (slots eight to eleven) are your bowling tail.
Here is the thing a lot of players wonder: you are chasing, so why does it matter how well your number tens and elevens bowl? Fair question, and technically those bowlers have already conceded the 500. But it is about who is in your team. Picking a prime Dale Steyn or Shoaib Akhtar for your lower order over some anonymous bowler is what turns your XI into a proper all-time side rather than a top-heavy list of run-scorers.
And it matters to the chase itself: when your batters walk out knowing there are genuine legends and icons sitting in the dugout behind them, it lifts their confidence and morale to get over the line. A great tail gives the whole side the belief that the impossible is on. So the game asks you to fill your lower four with real, elite bowlers. Stack pure batting all the way down and you are missing half of what makes a great cricket team great. The top seven carry the runs, the lower four carry the bowling pedigree, and both halves need to be elite.
Every rating starts with deep research through statistical databases of players' real ODI records. The numbers are built directly from career data:
On top of the raw stats comes a weighting for iconic and nostalgia status. A player who defined an era, who fans remember as a match-winner and a legend, gets his due even where the bare numbers understate him. This is the most important part of the system: the stats set the foundation, but the ratings are finished so that players are rated as fans remember them at their peak, in the shirt they are famous for. Older greats are also read in the context of their era, since strike rates across the game were naturally lower in the 1980s and 1990s. Stats inform, cricketing judgement and legacy decide.