The toss gets blamed for things the schedule actually caused

A coin is a convenient villain, but the real advantage was handed out weeks earlier by whoever decided the start times.

The toss discourse is now a fixture of every season. Captain calls, wins, bowls, wins the match, and by the second innings somebody has said that the game was over at seven o'clock.

Half true. The bit that gets left out is that the toss only carries that weight because of decisions made long before, and those decisions belong to a scheduler, not to a coin.

Consider two matches at the same venue. One starts in the afternoon in dry heat, the ball holds its shape, the surface offers something to the spinners in the second half, and batting first is a perfectly good option. The other starts under lights on a humid evening in a month where dew is heavy, and the side batting second gets a wet ball, a skidding surface and no meaningful spin threat. Same ground, same soil, radically different games. One of them has a near-decisive toss and the other does not, and nobody chose that. It was a broadcast slot.

So when people propose fixes for the toss, they are usually solving the wrong layer. Letting the away side choose is an interesting idea and it has been tried in other competitions, though it mostly just relocates the advantage rather than removing it. Abolishing the toss entirely and mandating alternate choices across a season is neater than it sounds and would at least make the unfairness symmetrical.

My preference is duller. Fix the start times. Move the venues with the worst dew profiles to afternoon fixtures more often, spread the evening slots across grounds where the effect is smaller, and accept that a couple of marquee sides will occasionally play at four in the afternoon. That is a genuine commercial cost and it is the only reason it does not happen.

There is a measurement point in all this too. When people quote how often the side batting second wins, that number is an average across venues with wildly different conditions, and averaging across them hides everything interesting. The useful version is venue by venue and month by month, and once you split it that way you find that at a good number of grounds the toss barely matters at all, while at three or four it matters enormously.

Which means the problem is small, specific and fixable. We just keep discussing it as though it were a philosophical question about luck in sport, and blaming a coin that had no say in when the match started.