The moment a chase is gone is the best time to promote your finisher

Sides protect their lower order in exactly the games where the result is already settled and the information is free.

Twenty-two needed off six, nine wickets down, and out walks the number eleven to face the strike. Nothing about that situation teaches anybody anything. The game is over, the crowd is leaving, and a young batter who might have learned something about hitting under pressure has spent the evening with a towel around his neck.

I want the opposite habit. When a chase is mathematically finished, and everyone in the ground knows it, that is the cheapest possible laboratory a team will ever get. The cost of failure is zero because the match is already lost. The conditions are real in every way that a net session is not: a proper bowler, a set field, floodlights, and the specific tightness in the chest that comes from having a scoreboard behind you. You cannot manufacture that in training and you get handed it four or five times a season for nothing.

So send the finisher in at four. Let him face thirty balls against the opposition's best death bowler with an impossible target, and find out whether he can actually clear the long boundary or whether he only clears the short one. Find out whether he panics against the wide slower ball. That information is worth more than the fourteen dignified runs your specialist will score while the required rate goes to eighteen.

Nobody does it and I understand why. Net run rate. In a league decided on fractions, losing by thirty rather than by nineteen can cost a semi-final place in a season nobody expects, and coaches are not paid to explain that kind of decision to a committee. It is a real constraint and I am not going to pretend it is imaginary.

But the constraint bites hardest in the last third of a tournament, and teams behave this way in the first game of the season too, when the run rate consequence is negligible and the information value is at its highest. That is just habit.

The counter I hear is that a dead chase is bad for confidence. Which cuts the other way, surely. A player told to go and swing with no expectation attached is being handed permission, and permission is the thing most lower-order batters are short of.

Use the losses. You have paid for them either way.