The heavy roller is a loan taken against the last five overs

Rolling a pitch buys pace and evenness now by spending the binding that keeps a surface alive later in the match.

Ask a curator what the heavy roller does and you get a straight answer: it presses the top layer down, squeezes air out, and produces a firmer, faster, more predictable surface. Ask what it does an hour later and the answer gets longer, because compaction is not free. What you have done is push moisture out of the profile and reduce the clay layer's ability to hold itself together under repeated impact.

Captains have a rolling choice at the start of an innings in longer cricket, and in shorter formats the curator has already made it for you before the toss. Either way the trade is the same. More rolling now means a better batting surface early, and a surface that begins to break down sooner than it otherwise would.

This is where I think the fashionable conclusion about big totals goes wrong. People look at the average score at a venue climbing over the years and describe it as bat dominance or better hitting or shorter boundaries. Some of it is. But a decent chunk is preparation policy, and preparation policy is a choice a tournament makes about what kind of product it wants. Roll harder, water less, and you have manufactured the run rate.

The part that gets no coverage is the second half of that bargain. A heavily rolled surface with the moisture squeezed out does not stay perfect. Under a match's worth of bowling it starts to abrade, and the first place you notice is the seam grip in the fourteenth over onwards. What was skidding on now sits up marginally. Marginally is all a good slower ball needs.

So my practical position is this. On a strip that was rolled hard, chase totals with a plan to take the risk early rather than late, because the surface will be better at the eighth over than at the eighteenth. That is the opposite of the standard advice about keeping wickets for the finish, and I am comfortable with the disagreement.

The curator, meanwhile, is being asked for two incompatible things: a high scoring spectacle and a pitch that survives multiple matches. He cannot deliver both from the same square. Something has to be borrowed, and it always gets borrowed from the end of the innings, where the bowlers are already blamed for everything.