The third over is where innings quietly go wrong

Everyone remembers the collapse in the middle, but the damage usually happened while both openers were still comfortably at the crease.

Two boundary overs to start. Twenty-two off the first twelve balls, the crowd is up, the graphic on screen says the projected total is two hundred and forty. Then the third over goes for four.

Nobody notices. It looks like a blip. It is not a blip, it is the most common failure pattern in the format, and it happens because both batters have just relaxed at exactly the same time.

The mechanism is a little bit psychological and a little bit tactical. After two good overs, the required tempo feels comfortable, and both batters unconsciously downgrade the next few balls from must-attack to can-wait. The bowling side, meanwhile, has just been hit and is making a change. Fresh bowler, different angle, and, crucially, a captain who now has permission to set a defensive-ish field even inside the powerplay because he is behind. Two men out becomes two men in the deepest permitted positions rather than in catching spots.

So you get a maiden-ish over, then a tidy one, and by the end of the fifth over the score is forty-four for none, which sounds fine and is actually seven or eight runs behind where it looked like being. Those eight runs get paid for at the death by a batter having to hit a boundary off the last ball instead of taking two.

What should happen is that the batter who is set should attack the change of bowler hardest, not softest. The new man is cold, he has not found his length, and the field is momentarily in transition. That is the best three balls of the entire powerplay and they are routinely treated as a moment to catch your breath.

The other thing that should happen, and rarely does, is the non-striker taking control of it. He can see the field being reset while the striker cannot. A single word at the end of the second over about where the gap has appeared is worth more than any team meeting, and you can tell which pairs actually do this because they get their singles on the wrong side of the field for the first two balls of every new over.

Watch for it. Third over, new bowler, both batters set. If they let it go for five or six and look content walking back to their marks, the innings has already lost runs it will spend the next fifteen overs trying to find.