The toss is not the villain. The dew is.

Every second-innings collapse gets blamed on the coin, when the real culprit arrives around the fourteenth over and soaks the ball.

Somebody loses a toss in an IPL evening game and the studio decides the match is already gone. It is lazy, and it is mostly wrong.

The coin does not do anything. What does something is moisture. In Chennai in April the outfield can stay dry all night and the ball behaves the same in the eighteenth over as it did in the second. In Kolkata or Mumbai, from late April, there is a point somewhere around the halfway mark of the second innings where the ball starts coming out of a bowler's hand like a bar of soap. A wrist-spinner who was ripping it at the start of the chase suddenly cannot land the googly, so he stops bowling it, so the batter stops respecting him. That is not luck. That is a predictable physical event that everyone in the ground can see happening, because you can watch the twelfth man jogging out with a towel every second over.

Treat the toss as a proxy for that and you get a cleaner picture. Chasing is not an advantage in the IPL. Chasing at a coastal venue in the back half of the tournament is an advantage, and the size of it swamps most of what the analysts argue about.

The interesting question is what a captain does when he loses the toss and knows dew is coming. The answers I like are unglamorous. Bat all the way through and set a number that assumes your bowlers will lose their grip, which means treating a par score as meaningfully higher than the surface suggests. Pick a finger-spinner over a leggie, because a bowler who spins it out of the fingers can still get purchase on a wet ball while a wrist-spinner is trying to hold a slippery cricket ball with fingertips. And get overs from the spinners early, before the towels come out, even if that means bowling spin inside the powerplay against two set openers.

Most sides do the opposite. They hold the spinner back for the middle, then discover the middle is soaking.

The dew is also why so much toss analysis ages badly. Move the same fixture to March, or to a dry inland ground, and the effect halves. Anyone quoting a league-wide chasing win rate without splitting it by venue and date is telling you about the weather, not about cricket.