The groundsman waters the square and picks your top order

How much water goes into a pitch two days before play shapes the first six overs more than any team meeting does.

Two days out, someone drags a hose across the square and makes a judgement call about litres. That judgement decides whether your aggressive opener looks like a match winner or a lunatic. Teams still treat it as background weather. It is not background. It is an input, and it arrives before the toss, before the team sheet, before anyone has looked at a matchup chart.

Here is the mechanism, stripped of mystique. Water held in the top few millimetres keeps the clay bound and the surface slightly soft. A soft top grips the seam for a fraction longer, which is enough to hold the ball up and take pace off it. The batter who plays through the line, who trusts the ball to come on, gets a half beat less than he expects. That half beat is the difference between a clean swing of the arms and a leading edge to cover.

So the hitter you picked for the first six overs is not a fixed asset. On a dry, baked surface he is worth what you paid. On a surface watered late, with the shine still on and any lateral movement at all, he is a liability who will be back in the dugout in the fourth over with the field still up and nobody set.

The honest position, and one plenty of coaches will dispute, is that most sides get this backwards. They stick with the plan because the plan was expensive. If you have bought a hitter, you open with the hitter. Sunk cost dressed up as clarity of role.

What I would rather see is a genuinely flexible top three where the order is settled after a walk on the square, not before. Send the compact player up when the surface is holding, and let the ball striker come in at seven overs when the shine has gone and the field has spread. Nothing about that is radical. It is just uncomfortable, because it means telling a well paid batter on the day that today is not his day.

Dew complicates the second innings, of course, and everyone talks about dew because it happens on camera. The water that mattered went in on Tuesday afternoon and nobody filmed it.