The extra batter rule took fear out of the powerplay, for better and worse

Give a captain a spare specialist and openers stop calculating risk, which has produced some spectacular starts and some very silly ones.

The old powerplay had a built-in brake. You had seven batters, maybe eight if the all-rounder counted, and if you lost three inside six overs you were finished. So openers took the field restrictions seriously but not recklessly. Two boundary balls an over, respect the good ones, be there at the end of the sixth.

Give a side an extra specialist batter who does not have to bowl, and that arithmetic evaporates. Now losing three early is survivable. It is not good, but it is survivable, and a captain who knows he has genuine batting down to eight will tell his openers to go from ball one and mean it.

The scores show it. Powerplay totals that would have been outstanding a few seasons ago are now unremarkable, and a side that reaches the sixth over on fifty for one no longer feels ahead. It feels level.

What I like about this is the shot selection at the very top. Openers now take on the fourth-stump length ball over cover on the first ball of the innings, because the downside is capped. That is genuinely thrilling and it has produced a batting style that would have been considered irresponsible not long ago.

What I like much less is what it has done to the bowling contest. A powerplay used to be a negotiation. Bowler probes, batter defends, somebody blinks. Now it is frequently just a slugging exercise where the bowler is a delivery mechanism for something to be hit, and captains have stopped setting attacking fields because there is no point when the batter is swinging regardless. Fewer slips. Fewer catching positions. More boundary riders inside the ring waiting for a mishit.

And there is a hollowing-out problem in the middle. Because the top order attacks so hard and the tail is so long, the batters at four and five increasingly face one of two situations: forty for four in the fifth over, in which case they are rebuilding, or ninety for one, in which case they arrive with nothing to do except stay out of the way. Neither develops a cricketer.

I would not scrap the rule. It has clearly made the tournament more watchable. But I would like somebody to argue seriously that it has made batting harder, because from where I sit it has removed the single most interesting constraint in the format, which was having to think about the consequences of getting out.