Saving the single has quietly become a lost skill

Field settings are now built almost entirely around stopping fours, and the ones and twos that leak through them add up faster.

Add it up before you dismiss it. A single conceded in each of ten overs is ten runs, which is a boundary and a half, and it arrives without a risk to the batting side, without a shot being played in the air, and without anyone in the ground noticing. A modern field is arranged to prevent the shot that gets applauded. It is not arranged to prevent the one that wins the game.

The reason is that captaincy has become a boundary-management exercise. Two out, then five out, then seven, and each decision is framed as which fence to protect. Inside that framing the fielders in the ring become traffic cones. They exist to be run past. Watch where they stand: deep enough to cut off the gap, square enough to look tidy, and eight yards further from the bat than the position that would actually stop a push into the covers.

Compare that with a well-drilled fielding side twenty years ago, when a point fielder stood close enough to make the batter think twice about pushing and walking. The batter then has to hit the ball harder to score, and hitting it harder into a ring means more chances go to hand. Saving the single is not just a run-prevention tactic. It is a wicket-taking one, because it forces the low-risk option to become a medium-risk option.

I accept the counter-argument. In the shortest format the boundary is worth so much more than the single that protecting it dominates, and any captain who brings a man up and gets chipped over him will be asked about it for a week. Risk to a captain's reputation is asymmetric and that shapes behaviour more than arithmetic does.

Even so, the phase where this is being got wrong is obvious. In the middle overs, against a set batter who is not trying to hit over the top, the danger is not the boundary. The danger is that he scores forty-five off thirty-two without ever hitting one, and your bowling figures look respectable while your total requirement quietly climbs.

Bring the ring in. Make him take a chance. The worst that happens is he plays a shot he did not want to play, which was the point.