Dot balls decide more matches than boundaries do

Everyone counts the fours and sixes because they are easy to count, but the pressure that produced them came from somewhere else.

Boundary percentage is the stat of choice for describing a T20 innings, and it is genuinely useful up to a point. Score fast, hit boundaries, win games. Nobody is going to argue that hitting the ball into the crowd is a bad idea.

The trouble is what it hides. A boundary is a symptom as often as it is a cause.

Take two identical scores of forty from thirty balls. The first is eight fours and twenty-two singles and dots roughly balanced. The second is four sixes, two fours, and fourteen dot balls. Same runs, same balls, and the second innings has done considerably more damage to the team, because those fourteen dots did not evaporate, they went into the pockets of the batters at the other end and came out later as a slog to deep midwicket in the seventeenth over.

Dots are the currency of pressure in the short format and they compound. Three in a row and the required rate has moved by a run an over, which changes the shot the next batter plays, which is how bowling sides win from nowhere. And crucially, dots are the one thing a bowler can control. He cannot stop a good batter hitting a good ball for six. He can absolutely stop a batter scoring at all for four deliveries in a row with a plan and a field.

Which is why I think economy rate, that supposedly outdated metric, still tells you more about a T20 bowler than his strike rate does. Wickets in this format are frequently a consequence of scoreboard pressure rather than a cause of it. The bowler who conceded seven off his second over and beat the bat twice created the wicket somebody else took.

The same logic applies to batting assessment. Strike rate at least accounts for balls used, but it treats every dot as equal, and they are not. A dot in the ninth over against a spinner bowling into the pitch is fine. A dot in the eighteenth is close to a wicket. Nobody phases it properly outside the analytics departments, and the broadcast graphic never will.

So by all means enjoy the sixes. Just remember that the innings which produced them was probably built by somebody rotating strike unglamorously for six overs while nobody was paying attention.