I'm surprised at the amount of people who feel that they need to premeditate against pace. My approach is to expect to play on the front foot and I seem to have no problem reacting to anything short which I usually attempt to pull if straight/legside or leave if wide of off. When I play in my career it's as a tailender and I generally leave or block and pick off the short ball. It can get a bit boring but it works.
I still think for the average person it shouldn't be so hard to pre-meditate. Especially on Veteran mode, I can play the ball on it's merit to pace bowlers to a very very small extent but even then I never time anything if I try this.
In any case, the point also is that there is no point playing the ball on its merit against pace bowlers. One can be vastly more successful choosing one shot before the bowler bowls. Certain shots like the clip to legside, ramp over third man, back and front foot lofted drive, cut shot (which I only play when right hand bowlers bowl around the wicket to right hand batsmen and vice verse) , etc are very high percentage shots despite fully pre-meditating them.
This... how many real life cricketers play "every" shot? You've got to have scoring areas and leave some.
In this day and age, most international crickets in ODIs and T20s need to have a lot of the shots in the bank. In the first 10 overs of ODIs and 6 overs of T20s, there are so many gaps that they simply have an aggressive mindset and hit the ball according to where it pitches. In the middle overs of limited overs matches, I can think of third man, fine leg, square leg, mid on, mid off, cover being areas where batsmen score singles from. If the ball is in the slot for them, they can decide to go over extra cover, deep midwicket, etc for boundaries. That's almost the whole field covered. Look at player wagon wheels on ODIs and T20s on cricinfo and most longish innings' batsmen play will have shots to most parts of the ground.
