Games are lost between the seventh and eleventh over

The quiet block after the fielding restrictions lift is the least coached phase of a T20 innings and the most decisive one.

Six overs of licensed violence, then the ring goes back, then thirty balls of nothing much, and then everyone starts talking again around the twelfth. That middle stretch gets the least analytical attention of any part of an innings, and I would argue it decides more matches than the powerplay does.

What happens there is structural. Two spinners come on. The field spreads. A batter who was hitting through the line suddenly has to work out how to score off a ball that is holding, with five men on the rope and no gaps in the ring worth attacking. The default response is to take singles and wait for the fourteenth over. That default is where thirty runs go missing.

The teams that handle it well do one of two things and both are unfashionable. Either they attack the seventh and eighth overs specifically, before the new spinner has settled his length and while the batters set in the powerplay are still in, accepting that a wicket there is a decent price. Or they identify one bowler in the opposition attack as the target and take him for two overs regardless of when he bowls, which forces the captain into using somebody worse later.

What almost everyone does instead is treat overs seven to eleven as a holding phase, a period to be survived so that the real batting can start. That framing was inherited from fifty over cricket where you genuinely had time. In twenty overs you do not. Five overs is a quarter of the innings.

There is a defensive version of the same argument that nobody makes either. A bowling side with a clear plan for that block, two spinners bowling to a set field with a rehearsed sequence, can strangle a chase without taking a wicket, and then the required rate does the work in the last five. Sides that get to the sixteenth over needing thirteen an over have almost always been beaten in the middle, not at the death, but the post match talk goes to whoever bowled the twentieth.

So the number I would put on the graphic is not the powerplay score. It is runs and wickets between the seventh and eleventh, side by side, for both innings. Look at that column for a season and you will predict results better than any powerplay figure will let you.