The wicket ball only works if the captain accepts the one before it goes for four

Dismissals are built over three or four deliveries, and short-format thinking has made bowlers too frightened to spend the first two.

Four wide half volleys outside off stump, driven, and then the fifth one is a fraction wider and the batter nicks it. Everybody applauds the fifth ball. The first four cost eleven runs and they are the reason the fifth one worked, and if that bowler's captain had reacted to the second of them by moving a fielder and asking for a tighter line, the plan would have died before it paid.

This is the tension that makes wicket-taking harder than it looks. A dismissal usually requires the batter to be pulled slightly out of shape, which means feeding him something he likes until his weight starts going somewhere it should not. That is not a free operation. It is an investment, priced in runs, and it only makes sense if somebody is willing to let the over run.

Limited-overs cricket has trained everyone out of this, including in formats where it is still the right approach. A bowler who concedes eight in the first three balls of an over is now visibly under instruction to stop the bleeding, and the plan collapses into damage limitation. Meanwhile the batter, who was two deliveries from playing a false shot, gets a nice tidy ball he can leave and a chance to reset.

I would draw the line at the phase rather than at the format. In the first ten overs of an innings of any length, and in almost any session of a Test, the run cost of a setup sequence is affordable and the wicket is worth more. At the death it is obviously not. The failure is that teams apply death-over caution to the eleventh over of a fifty-over game, and then wonder why they take wickets only when a batter makes a mistake unprompted.

There is a captaincy point buried in this. The bowler cannot make the decision on his own, because he will be judged on his figures and figures do not record intention. Only the captain can absorb the cost, and absorbing it means saying out loud before the over that the first three balls are allowed to go for runs.

Very few captains say that. The ones who do get more wickets, and their bowlers say the same thing about them afterwards without ever quite explaining why.