The opener who does not score in the powerplay has the hardest job in the format

Absorbing the new ball while a partner attacks is thankless, unmeasurable and quietly decides a large share of short-format matches.

Six overs, two fielders out, a hard ball, and two batters with completely different assignments that nobody ever writes down. One of them will be described afterwards as taking the game away. The other will be described as slow, and there is a decent chance he did the more difficult thing.

Consider what the anchoring opener is managing. The ball is new, which means it swings and seams for roughly fifteen deliveries and then stops. A wicket in that window does not merely cost a batter, it exposes the middle order to a moving ball with the field up, which is the worst position a chasing side can be in. So somebody has to survive the swinging phase without dying and without freezing so completely that the required rate becomes impossible. Both failures are fatal and they pull in opposite directions.

Nobody values it because we have no number for it. Strike rate punishes him. Average rewards him for the wrong reason, since it counts the innings where he blocked his way to fifty and lost the match anyway. Balls faced is a raw count with no direction attached. What you would want is something like the runs his survival denied the bowling side, which nobody can measure, so the role survives on the word of coaches who watched the games.

Here is my disagreement with the current fashion. The analytics answer has been to abolish the job and tell everyone to attack from ball one, on the reasoning that a powerplay wicket is cheap when there are batters to spare. That holds in a league with deep batting and flat pitches. It falls apart on a green seamer in April, and it falls apart in a knockout, where the cost of being bowled out for sixty is not one defeat but a season.

The honest version is that the role is conditional, and sides ought to be able to switch it on and off inside an innings rather than declaring an identity in the team meeting.

Most cannot. Most decide in March what sort of side they are, then explain the June collapse as bad luck.