The fourth over is where powerplays are lost

Teams rehearse the first three overs and the last three, improvise everything in between, and then blame the surface.

Openers get taught two things. Survive the new ball, then accelerate. What almost nobody coaches properly is the joint between those instructions, which arrives somewhere around the fourth over, when the ball has stopped swinging, the bowler has changed, and the field is still up.

That window is the cheapest scoring in the innings and it is routinely wasted. The batters are still in survival mode after an over that beat them twice. The captain has just brought on his third seamer, who is the weakest of the three, and he gets a maiden because nobody switched gear. Then the field spreads and everybody complains that the pitch was slow.

The mechanism is simple enough. With only two fielders permitted outside the ring, a mishit is worth far more than it will be later, because the deep positions that would swallow it are not there yet. A top edge that becomes a catch at deep third in the twelfth over is four runs in the fifth. That is not luck. It is the field setting paying you for a shot you played badly, and it is the strongest argument for taking risk early rather than late.

The counterargument is wickets, and it is fair. Lose three inside six overs and the whole innings reshapes. But teams over-price that outcome because it is memorable and embarrassing, while a sixth over that goes for four is invisible in the highlights. I would take the occasional collapse. The arithmetic favours it in short formats, and the sides that have committed to it have not been punished nearly as often as the cautious ones predicted.

There is a selection consequence people miss. If you intend to attack overs four to six, you want an opener whose scoring options are square rather than straight, because the two protected riders usually sit behind square and at deep midwicket, and the real gaps are at point and cover. Pick a straight-hitting slogger and you are aiming at the fielders the rules left in place.

Watch a side that gets this right and you notice something odd. Their powerplay total is rarely enormous. It is just never small. They have stopped donating the middle three overs to a bowler who did not earn them.