Red soil and black soil want completely different lengths from you

The same good-length ball behaves like two different deliveries depending on what the square was built out of, and almost nobody says so on air.

Cricket pitches in India are broadly made from two families of soil, and the difference between them changes bowling more than any amount of grass covering does.

Black soil, the heavy cotton-growing stuff, has high clay content. It binds tightly, it holds together when rolled, and it produces a surface that grips the ball and lets it come on slowly. Bounce tends to be lower and more consistent. Spinners get purchase, and a ball landing on a good length sits up rather than skidding through.

Red soil has less clay and more sand-sized particles. It bonds less tightly, so it breaks up faster over a match and over a season, but while it is intact it gives you more bounce and more pace off the surface. The ball comes on. A cut shot works. A pull shot works.

Now apply that to a bowler's length. On a black-soil surface, back of a length is a gift, because the ball sits up at waist height with no pace on it and gets pulled into the stands. You have to bowl fuller than instinct tells you, right up into the batter's driving zone, and accept being driven occasionally because the alternative is worse. On red soil, that same full length is the wrong ball, because there is enough carry that a hard length into the pitch takes the ball above the batter's comfortable hitting arc and makes the pull genuinely risky.

Roughly a foot of difference in where you want the ball to land. That is not a subtlety, that is the entire plan, and a quick who bowls his red-soil length on a black-soil surface will go for sixty in four overs and look like he had a bad night.

Spinners have the mirror problem. On the gripping surface, flight and revolutions do the work and you can afford to give the ball air. On the harder, faster one, tossing it up is suicide and the answer is pace through the air with a flatter trajectory into the pitch, letting the bounce create the error rather than the turn.

What baffles me is how little of this reaches the viewer. Broadcasts spend enormous energy on whether the surface looks dry, which tells you something about the top two millimetres and almost nothing about what is underneath. The soil composition of a square is a matter of public record at most grounds. Somebody could just say it before the toss.