Most bowlers use about a foot of a crease that is nearly nine wide

Changing the angle of delivery alters the line of every ball without touching the action, and almost nobody bothers.

Stand square to a bowler's mark for an hour of first-class cricket and you will see the same back foot land in the same scuffed patch, delivery after delivery, over after over, all day. The crease is eight feet and eight inches wide. Most bowlers use the width of their own boot, and then complain that a batter has got used to them.

What moving wide does is change geometry without changing anything the bowler has to learn. Go a foot wider on the crease and every delivery arrives on a different angle across the batter, which shifts the line of the ball at the stumps, changes where the edge would carry and alters the lbw geometry, because a ball starting wider must come back further to hit. To the batter it feels like a new bowler. To the bowler it is the same run-up and the same release.

The classic use is against a left-right pairing, where going around and wide creates an angle that makes leaving dangerous. The underused version is against a batter who has settled and is playing the same trigger movement over and over. He has calibrated for one line of sight. Take that away for two deliveries and he is guessing again, and guessing produces the false shot.

The reason bowlers avoid it is that footholes are worn where everybody lands, and stepping out of the hole feels unstable, particularly late in a day. That is a real physical constraint rather than laziness, and it is why the change is best used early in a spell.

Here is where I disagree with a lot of bowling coaches. They treat crease position as a specialist tactic held back for a particular matchup. I think it should be part of the default repertoire, drilled until it is as automatic as changing pace, because it is the cheapest variation in cricket. It costs no accuracy, no fitness and no risk.

We spend fortunes teaching bowlers to change the ball. Nobody spends an afternoon teaching them to change where they stand.