Somebody should go back to hitting fours

Six hitting is the fashionable skill and the four remains the lowest risk way to move an innings forward.

A four requires a gap. A six requires a gap in the sky and a clean strike and, usually, a shot played with a longer swing and a bigger margin for error. Teams have collectively decided the second is the better business, and across a whole competition, on flat surfaces and short grounds, they are broadly right. In particular situations they are badly wrong, and the situations recur every week.

The number that gets quoted is boundary percentage, meaning the share of deliveries that reach the rope. It is a fine descriptive statistic and a poor decision tool, because it merges two shots with completely different risk profiles. A batter who scores a third of his runs in fours off the back foot square of the wicket, on a slow pitch, against a spinner, is doing something with a very low chance of dismissal. A batter clearing long on with a slog sweep on the same surface is not.

Where it bites is the middle overs on a gripping surface. The ball is holding, the boundary riders are back, and the whole coaching orthodoxy says look for the six because ones and twos will not get you to a total. So a set batter takes on the long boundary, does not get hold of it, and the innings loses the only man who had worked out the pace. Then a new batter faces six balls doing nothing and the team ends up shorter than if the set player had simply hunted the gap at point for four.

My position is that the four has been undervalued specifically by the presence of the six, and that a batter with genuine placement is worth more on slow surfaces than his aggregate boundary percentage suggests. Placement is not fashionable. There is no highlight package for a late cut.

There is also a fielding consequence. Defending a slow surface, most captains set for the six, pushing everybody to the rope, which opens the ring completely. A batter who can find the gap at cover then scores at nine an over without ever hitting the ball in the air, and the bowling side has no answer available because bringing the ring back in reopens the boundary.

Somebody, at some point, is going to build a middle order around that and everyone will call it a revelation. It is not. It is what batting looked like before the rope came in.