Going around the wicket is usually an admission of defeat

Left-arm spinners are sent around the wicket to bowl into the rough, and the field that comes with it tells the batter everything.

The captain signals, the bowler changes sides, and two fielders move to the leg side boundary. Everyone in the ground understands what has just happened. The left-arm spinner is going to aim at the footmarks outside the right-hander's off stump, or more often at the pads, and the plan for the next six overs is to make scoring awkward rather than to get anybody out.

Sometimes that is the correct plan. It is chosen far more often than it is correct.

The geometry does offer something genuine. From around the wicket the angle takes the ball across the right-hander toward the rough created by the seamers' follow-through, and a ball landing in that broken area can turn sharply or not at all, which is a real problem for a batter playing forward. Against a settled pair on a fourth-day surface, with a captain trying to buy time until the second new ball, it is a defensible piece of match management.

What it is not is a wicket-taking mode, and the field placement gives the game away. Two out on the leg side, a short leg who is really there for decoration, a packed on side and no slip. That field says the bowler has stopped believing in the outside edge. A batter reading it correctly simply stops playing at anything wide, kicks away whatever pitches in the rough, and waits.

The alternative, staying over the wicket and bowling a fuller line at the stumps with a genuine attacking field, requires accepting that the batter can use their feet and hit through the line. More runs, more risk, more chances. That trade is one most captains will not make while the scoreboard is quiet, because a maiden feels safe and a boundary feels like a mistake.

There is also a physical cost people ignore. Bowling around the wicket into the rough for long spells encourages the spinner to flatten and push the ball, and a spinner who spends two seasons doing that loses the loop they had. The tactic can quietly deskill the bowler who executes it.

If I were captain, I would use it for a burst, with an attacking field, and go back over the wicket the moment the batter looks comfortable rather than the moment they hit two boundaries.

By then you have already told them there is nothing to fear.