Dew is the biggest variable in the tournament and we still pretend otherwise

A wet ball after the twelfth over removes an entire skill from the game, and the competition's answer to this is a coin.

There are venues where, on certain nights, the match is effectively decided before a ball is bowled. Not by the pitch, not by the squads, but by the humidity forecast and which captain calls correctly.

Here is what dew actually does. Water settles on the outfield and on the ball. A wet ball does not grip, so a finger spinner cannot impart revolutions and a wrist spinner cannot land his googly. It does not swing, because swing needs a dry, differentiated surface. It skids on rather than gripping off the pitch, so the surface stops mattering. And it slips in the hand of a fast bowler trying to bowl a yorker, which is why you see so many low full tosses in the eighteenth over of a damp night.

Every one of those is a skill removed. The bowling side in the second innings is not playing a harder version of the same game. It is playing a different, smaller game with fewer tools available.

The response has been a towel and a bucket. Bowlers dry the ball between deliveries, groundstaff drag ropes across the outfield at the innings break, and some venues use chemical sprays on the square. All of it helps a little. None of it changes the fundamental fact that a captain who wins the toss on a dewy night at certain grounds will bowl second, every time, and the team batting second wins a lot more than half of those matches.

What frustrates me is that cricket already solved a version of this. We accept rain-adjusted targets because we accept that changed conditions require a mathematical correction. Dew is a changed condition. It is measurable, it is forecastable, and its effect on second-innings scoring at specific venues in specific months is well documented by anyone who bothers to look.

I am not naive about the difficulty. A dew adjustment would be contentious, it would require a model everyone trusts, and it would produce a target that looks arbitrary to a casual viewer. Fine. But the alternative we have chosen is to let a coin decide, and a coin is not less arbitrary, it is just more traditional.

At minimum, schedule the venues that suffer worst for afternoon starts more often. It is not a fix. It would at least be an admission that the problem exists, which is further than anybody has got so far.