The pinch hitter has become the most wasted role in white ball cricket

Promoting a tail-end slogger up the order made sense when only the first six overs were free; it makes very little now.

Somebody gets sent up at number three because a left-hander is bowling and the team has decided they need momentum. He hits two fours, misses a slower ball, walks off having faced eleven deliveries, and the innings restarts from a position slightly worse than it was. This gets called an aggressive move. It is usually a lazy one.

The role made sense once. In an era when the first fifteen overs had two fielders outside the circle and the middle overs had five, boundaries were available at the start and almost nowhere else, and it was rational to send a hitter to use the field restriction even at a high risk of losing a wicket. The value of the wicket was low compared to the value of the phase.

That arithmetic has been dismantled. Modern white ball fields, particularly in twenty over cricket, restrict the fielders at the start and then still allow the batting side to attack through the middle if wickets are in hand, because the modern middle-order player can hit at a strike rate that would have been front-line power hitting twenty years ago. Wickets have gone up in value. A batting side four down in the tenth over has lost its ability to accelerate at the end, and the end is where the largest run-scoring opportunity now sits.

Then there is the moisture argument, which teams use to justify the promotion and which usually points the other way. If there is life in the surface early, or the ball is moving under lights, that is the phase in which your best technician should be batting, not your least equipped. Sending a hitter into seam movement is not aggression. It is handing the bowling side the one thing they wanted.

Where I would keep the tactic is narrow and specific. A genuine matchup, in a chase, with a required rate that has already made caution pointless, or a night when the ball is skidding on and one particular bowler cannot be allowed to complete a quiet spell.

Otherwise, send your best batter. It is a startling thing to have to write.

The reason coaches do not is that a promotion that fails looks like bad luck, while a conservative move that fails looks like cowardice, and everyone would rather be unlucky than timid on television.