Red soil and black soil do not reward the same batter

Clay content decides whether a ball comes on or holds up, and squads are still assembled on form rather than surface type.

Black cotton soil holds water and shrinks as it dries, which is why surfaces built on it crack the way they do and why they slow down with lower bounce as a match goes on. Red soil carries less clay, drains faster, binds less. Roll the two identically, water them identically, and you get two different games of cricket. Everyone in the sport knows this. Squad selection barely reflects it.

Here is the argument. If a franchise plays half its matches on a low bounce, gripping surface, the most valuable batter available to it is not the biggest hitter on the market. It is the one who scores square of the wicket off the back foot against slower balls, because on that surface the straight hitting game gets shut down by the ball stopping. And yet the market pays for the straight hitter, because straight hitting is what shows up in a highlight package filmed at a hard, true ground somewhere else.

The bowling side is starker still. Where the ball holds, a wrist spinner who lives on bounce and drift is less dangerous than a finger spinner who can drag the pace down to something horrible, and the express quick is worth less than the bloke who takes fifteen kilometres off and bangs it into the surface. A squad built for pace and bounce is a squad that works for half its season.

There is a fashionable counterargument that the modern batter is surface agnostic, that power hitting has flattened these differences. I do not buy it. What actually happened is that batters got better on the good surfaces, so the gap between a true pitch and a difficult one widened rather than closed. Scores on flat grounds have gone up enormously. Scores on gripping ones have moved much less.

The test is easy and nobody publishes it. Take a batter's scoring rate at venues where the average run rate is high, then at venues where it is low, and look at the difference rather than the total. Some celebrated hitters lose almost nothing. Others shed a third of their output, and their career figures hide it because the schedule was kind.

That difference is the number I would want before spending money, and it is the number I have never once seen on a broadcast graphic.