The first ten balls cost more than anyone admits

A slow start is treated as good cricket, but somebody else always pays the interest on it.

Watch a chase go wrong and count backwards. Not to the wicket that fell in the nineteenth over, and not to the dropped catch. Count back to the opener who faced fourteen balls for four runs and then got out anyway, having achieved nothing except the transfer of a problem to the man walking in.

We have a very forgiving language for this. He was seeing off the new ball. He was giving himself time. He was respecting the conditions. Sometimes all of that is true and the pitch really is doing something wicked for half an hour. Far more often it is a batter buying his own comfort with somebody else's strike rate, and the accounting never catches up with him because the scorecard records what he made, not what he cost.

The number I would want is not a strike rate. It is the run rate required when a batter arrived compared with the run rate required when he left. That is a single figure, it is easy to calculate, and it would be extremely uncomfortable reading for a certain kind of accumulator. You can score thirty from thirty and leave the game in a worse state than you found it. You can score twelve from eight and leave it better.

None of this is an argument for swinging at everything from the first delivery. The genuinely difficult period exists. What I object to is that the length of it has become a matter of personal preference rather than a reading of the actual conditions. A batter decides before he walks out that he is going to take twenty balls, and he takes twenty balls whether the ball is hooping or sitting up begging.

The teams that have got this right did it by removing the decision from the individual. Somebody upstairs is watching how much the ball is actually moving and telling the middle what the plan is, and it changes between the fourth over and the sixth. That sounds cold. It is a great deal warmer than blaming the finisher for a required rate he did not create.

The other thing worth saying is that a slow start is not free even when it works. Ten dot balls at the top is not ten neutral events. It is a bowler settling, a captain gaining confidence in his field, and a scoreboard that begins to apply pressure to the person least equipped to absorb it. Somebody is going to have to take a risk to get those runs back, and it will not be the man who saved himself.