The finisher is a role teams pay far too much money for

Judging a player on a few dozen high-pressure deliveries a season measures variance more accurately than it measures skill.

A finisher's reputation is built on a sample so small it would be laughed at in any other analytical context. Consider what the job actually consists of across a season. Perhaps fifteen innings, of which maybe eight involve a genuine close finish, in which he faces ten or twelve balls each. That is under a hundred deliveries that matter, and on that basis somebody is declared ice-cold under pressure and paid accordingly.

The skills are real, I should say that plainly. Hitting straight against a yorker, picking a slower ball out of the hand, running hard between wickets when tired and knowing which bowler to target are all learnable and all separate from ordinary batting. I am not claiming the role is imaginary. I am claiming that our ability to measure who is good at it is far weaker than our confidence about it.

Look at what happens to these reputations over time. A player has two magnificent seasons of finishing, gets bought for a fortune, then has one poor year and is described as having lost his nerve. The likelier explanation is that his true ability was always somewhere in the middle and we were watching the tails of a distribution and calling them character. Regression to the mean does not care about temperament.

There is also a structural problem with the role. The finisher spends most of the season not batting, or batting for three balls, which is a terrible way to stay in touch with your own game. He gets less practice at the actual thing than a top-order player gets in a fortnight, and then we ask why he looks scratchy.

The fix is not to abolish the job but to stop treating it as a separate profession. Teach four players in the squad to do it, rotate who goes in last according to who is set and who the bowling favours, and you have spread the variance across enough deliveries that the good ones can actually be identified over two seasons.

If I were building a squad I would rather have two middle-order players who can bat anywhere and hit properly at the end than one specialist with an aura and a price tag.

The aura is mostly other people's memory of two good nights.