Dot balls tell you far more about an innings than boundaries do

Two batters can finish with identical boundary counts and one of them has cost his side twenty runs, and the scorecard will not say which.

Boundary percentage has a lovely simplicity. What share of the balls you faced went to the rope. Higher is better. It feels like it measures aggression, and it does, sort of.

Here is the problem with it. Player A faces thirty balls, hits ten boundaries and blocks the other twenty. Player B faces thirty, hits ten boundaries and runs singles off fourteen of the rest. Same boundary percentage, same number of boundaries, but B has scored fourteen more runs and, far more importantly, has rotated strike fourteen times, which means the bowler never got to settle on one batter and the fielding captain never got to set a field and leave it there.

The scorecard shows B ahead on strike rate, which is something, but strike rate does not tell you where the difference came from. Dot-ball percentage does, immediately.

And dots compound in a way boundaries do not. Two consecutive dots against a set batter in the twelfth over changes his next decision. He now needs a boundary rather than wanting one, which means he plays a bigger shot to a ball that did not deserve it, which is how the wicket comes. Almost every collapse in the middle overs traces back to a pressure sequence of three or four dots rather than to one unplayable delivery. The dismissal gets replayed and analysed. The three dots before it are never mentioned.

This also explains why certain batters are worth far more than their averages suggest. The player who never seems to hit a six but is somehow always on strike for the last ball of the over, who works it to deep midwicket for one, who takes two where everyone else takes one because he ran the first hard. Deeply unfashionable skills. They keep the required rate flat, and a flat required rate means the batters at the other end can wait for a bad ball instead of manufacturing one.

My honest view is that boundary percentage survives in broadcast because sixes are the product. It is easier to sell a graphic about someone clearing the rope. Dot-ball percentage is a graphic about not doing something, which nobody wants on screen between overs.

But if you get one number about a chase, take dots. And if a side is chasing a hundred and eighty and their dot count after twelve overs is above thirty, you can start planning your evening. They are not getting there, whatever the boundary tally says.