Promotion in the order is the tactic, and the hitter is almost incidental

Sending a big striker up early is discussed as a personnel choice, but the value sits entirely in which balls it frees up.

A wicket falls in the fifth over and out walks somebody who bats at seven on a normal day. Commentary calls it a gamble on a hitter. It is not really about the hitter. It is about what the innings does with the twelve deliveries of fielding restriction that would otherwise be spent by a specialist batter playing himself in.

The arithmetic is unglamorous and it is the entire point. Every ball faced inside the restrictions is worth more than the same ball in the fifteenth over, because two fielders are stuck in the ring and there is nobody patrolling the deep on one side. If your best striker of a cricket ball is going to face thirty deliveries in this innings, the value of those thirty changes enormously depending on which thirty they are.

So the promotion is a way of moving expensive balls to the player most likely to convert them. It should be judged on that, and not on whether the man got out.

Here is where I part company with the usual discussion. People say a promoted batter failed because he holed out for eleven off six. That is a perfectly reasonable outcome of a correct decision. He was sent up to attempt a shot with a low success rate and a large payoff. If he never got out doing it, the plan was too timid to be worth the disruption.

The real failure is different and much quieter. It is the promoted player who arrives, looks at the situation, decides to respect the new ball, and blocks four. He has now taken the restriction overs and spent them worse than the man he replaced. Nobody ever calls that a disaster, because the scorecard shows him not out.

Which means the instruction matters more than the selection. If you promote somebody you have to give him the licence without conditions, and you have to back him publicly afterwards, or the next man up will hedge and you will get the blocking version.

I would go further. Most sides should promote earlier and more often than they do, because the downside is capped by the simple fact that somebody has to face those deliveries regardless.

The wicket is coming out of the budget either way. Spend it while the field is up.