Pinch hitting is a phrase that describes nothing any more

It was coined for a specific gamble in a cautious era, and now that everyone hits from ball one it has quietly lost its meaning.

Pinch hitter. The term came from an era when opening the batting meant seeing off the new ball, and sending up a lower-order swinger to attack the field restrictions was a genuine gamble that the commentary box found faintly outrageous. It described a deviation from a norm.

The norm is gone. Every side in this competition opens with two players instructed to attack immediately. There is no cautious template left to deviate from, which means calling anyone a pinch hitter is like calling a modern fullback an attacking fullback. Compared to what?

What has replaced it is more interesting and nobody has bothered to name it properly. There is a role now, usually at three, occasionally floated up to open, whose specific job is to change the tempo of an innings that has gone wrong in a particular direction. Not to score fast in general, which everyone does, but to attack one identified weakness in the opposition attack for a short, violent period and then either get out or hand over.

That is a completely different brief. It is matchup-driven. Left-arm spinner into the wind, so you send the batter who has decided he is going to hit him over extra cover regardless of what happens. Two overs, maybe eighteen balls, and the entire selection of that player for that moment is built around eighteen balls. If he is dismissed on the ninth, that is priced in.

The hardest part is not the hitting. It is the willingness to be used and discarded, and the fact that the numbers on the scoreboard will never look kind. A player who does this job well might finish a season averaging low with a spectacular strike rate and get quietly dropped by a franchise that reads the average column.

Which brings me to what actually annoys me here. The role exists, coaches use it deliberately, and the vocabulary around it is still borrowed from the nineties. So the broadcast describes a highly specific tactical instruction as somebody having a slog, and the audience learns nothing about what they just watched.

Give it a name. Impact opener, tempo breaker, whatever. Just stop using a word that meant something in a different sport in a different decade and now means, at best, this man is hitting the ball hard, which describes eleven of them.