The yorker is not the safest ball at the death any more

Batters have practised against it for a decade, the margin for error is tiny, and there is a better option most bowlers ignore.

Every death-overs conversation starts and ends with the yorker, and I think that is a hangover from a version of the game that no longer exists.

Consider what you are actually asking of a bowler. Land the ball within roughly thirty centimetres of the batter's toes, at speed, in the nineteenth over, with dew on it, against a man who has spent all winter facing a bowling machine set to exactly that length with a leg-side scoop pre-loaded. Get it right and you concede a single. Get it a fraction full and it is a low full toss into the arc. A fraction short and it is a half-volley. The distance between the best ball in cricket and the worst one is about the length of your hand.

The alternative that goes underused is the hard length into the surface, aimed at the ribs or just outside off, bowled cross-seam so it skids or grips unpredictably off the pitch. It is not a glamorous ball. It also has a huge margin for error, because anything from back of a length to genuinely short is playable as the same delivery from the bowler's point of view, and the batter has to generate all the pace himself while playing off the back foot with a man out at deep square and another at long-on.

Field it properly and you can survive a mis-hit. A top edge over fine leg for six is a bad outcome, but it is one outcome from a range where most of the others are a scrambled two.

There is also the injury argument, which nobody wants to have. The yorker is bowled with a full follow-through and an aggressive front-leg block, over and over, at maximum effort, at the end of a long season. Ask any physio which delivery they associate with lower-back stress in young quicks. It is not the back-of-a-length ball.

I am not saying abandon the yorker. Keep it for the ball after a boundary, the ball when a new batter arrives, the one you have set up with two slower balls. Use it as the surprise, which is what it should have been all along, rather than the default that everybody in the ground including the batter is already expecting.