The twelve balls after a wicket get wasted far too often

A new batter is at his most vulnerable immediately, and captains keep responding by quietly taking the pressure off him.

Two wickets in an over. The crowd is up, the bowler is walking back with his chest out, and a batter who has not faced a ball is taking guard. What happens next, far more often than it should, is that the captain moves a slip to gully, sends the man at short cover back twenty yards, and settles for a maiden.

Why? He has just been handed the twelve best deliveries he will get all session and he has decided to bank them instead of spending them.

Everything we know about dismissals, and everything anybody who has batted already knows in their body, says the first dozen balls are the dangerous ones. You are judging pace off the surface, you have no feel for the bounce, your feet are half a beat late, every bowler looks quicker than he is. Survive that and the same bowling becomes readable. The window is short and it closes on its own.

So attack it. Properly. A catcher in front of square on the off side for the drive on the up, a short leg if there is any bounce at all, and a bowler told to pitch it fuller than his natural length even at the cost of a boundary. Four runs conceded in that window is a cheap price. A settled batter at the crease for the next two hours is not.

It does not happen because captaincy gets judged over by over. Nobody is criticised for a maiden. Everybody is criticised for a four. So the incentive runs toward safety at the exact moment the situation calls for greed, and the standard commentary line, keep it tight, don't let him off the hook, describes doing the opposite of what it claims.

There is a bowling-change version of the same error. A captain takes a wicket with his fourth-change seamer and immediately brings back the strike bowler for the new man. Sometimes right. Often wrong, because the bowler who just struck has rhythm and the new batter has never seen him, and continuity beats reputation in that moment more often than captains allow.

The field the incoming batter looks up at tells him everything about how the next quarter of an hour is going to go. Spread ring, he relaxes, takes his single, is away. Two catchers and a man under his nose, he has to play at deliveries he would much rather leave.

Make him play. Then, by all means, complain about the four.