The rope has crept in and the six has lost most of its meaning

Boundaries are set to fit sponsor signage and camera positions, and the game has changed shape without anyone voting on it.

A six used to mean clearing a fence at the edge of the ground. Now it frequently means clearing a rope pulled several metres inside the fence, positioned so that the advertising boards, the camera cranes and the sponsor's inflatable all have somewhere to live. Nobody decided this. It accumulated, venue by venue, and it has quietly rewritten what a good shot is.

The arithmetic is brutal at the margin. Bring the rope in by five metres and shots that were caught on the fence now clear it, and a mishit off the toe of the bat carries. The batter who cannot hit properly is rewarded on exactly the deliveries where the bowler executed. That is not power, it is geometry, and it is being sold as an evolution of batting.

The knock-on lands on bowling economy, which is why the numbers of the last two decades cannot be compared with anything earlier without an asterisk the size of a scoreboard. An economy of eight in a ground with sixty-five metre square boundaries is a different performance from an economy of eight where the square boundaries are eighty. We know this. We publish the figures side by side anyway.

There is a fielding cost too, and it is the one nobody films. A rope pulled in leaves a dead strip of grass between rope and fence that the outfielder must judge on the run, and the catch on the boundary, the one where a fielder throws the ball up and steps back, is a different act at five metres from the hoardings than at fifteen. The margin for the relay catch shrinks with the ground.

The counterargument is that the crowd wants sixes, and I have sat in enough grounds to know it is true. The noise when a ball lands in the third tier is the loudest thing in sport. Fine. But there is a difference between a ground that is genuinely small, which is charming and historical, and a large ground artificially shrunk for the convenience of a broadcast.

Publish boundary dimensions for every match, square and straight, on the scorecard, the way a pitch report is given.

Then let the analysts adjust, and let us all see which grounds have been quietly moving the target closer.