White-ball bowlers have abandoned the stumps and it shows in the wicket columns

Wide lines protect an economy rate, but the two cheapest dismissals in cricket both require bowling straight.

Bowled and lbw are free. They need no fielder, no catch, no review going your way and no luck beyond the batter missing. They are also the two dismissals a bowler makes least likely when he spends an over aiming at a spot eighteen inches outside off stump with a sweeper behind point.

The wide line exists for a good reason, which is that it limits the scoring arc and forces a batter to hit against the field. On flat surfaces against powerful hitters it is often correct, and I am not pretending otherwise. But it has become a default rather than a decision, and the effect is a generation of bowlers who genuinely cannot hit the top of middle stump on demand, because it is not what they have practised for six years.

You see the consequence when a plan is needed and there is no bowler for it. A batter walks in at number six needing eleven an over, and the sensible response is to attack his stumps for two balls before he has his eye in, because a new batter is at his most vulnerable to a straight full delivery and least able to manufacture a shot to a wide one. The bowler goes wide anyway. He goes wide because that is the ball he trusts, and the new batter gets three deliveries to settle that he should never have received.

The rules pull the same way. A stumps-to-stumps line to a batter who has moved across is a wide down the leg side, and the punishment for that is an extra run and another delivery, which makes the whole idea feel reckless in a tight over.

So the incentive structure has quietly removed the most economical form of wicket-taking from the game, and we describe the result as batters being better. Look at how many wickets in a season fall to a straight ball early in an innings, then look at how few bowlers are actually trying to produce one.

Some of it is batters being better. A good part of it is bowlers no longer aiming at the thing they are supposed to hit.