Send your best hitter up when the top order collapses

Batting orders freeze at exactly the moment they should change, and the finisher ends up with nine balls he cannot use.

Three down in the fifth over. What happens next, in almost every team in the world, is that the next name on the sheet walks out and is told to see off the situation, and the side's most destructive player sits with his pads on until the fifteenth over and then faces nine balls.

That is a waste of the best resource available, and the reasoning behind it is weaker than the tradition suggests.

The case for holding a finisher back is that his skills are specific to the last overs, against yorkers and slower balls with a spread field. Some of that is true. But the deeper reason he is valuable is that he scores faster than anyone else in the side, and scoring faster is worth more when there are more balls left, not fewer. A player who can go at a hundred and eighty for fifteen balls is worth about eleven extra runs. The same player, promoted with fourteen overs remaining and given forty balls, is worth far more, even if his rate falls because he has to see off a new spell.

The objection is risk. Send the hitter in at three down and he might be out for four, and then you are five down at the halfway point with nobody left. Real. But look at what the conservative alternative actually produces, which is a rebuilding partnership at five an over that leaves a required rate the remaining batters cannot chase. Both plans can fail. One of them fails while still occasionally winning.

There is a version of this teams already accept in the other direction, the promotion of a hitter when a chase is going well and the rate is under control. Everyone approves of that because it feels like pressing an advantage. Promotion under pressure is the same decision made when it is worth more, and it gets called reckless because it is visible when it goes wrong.

The pinch hitting era taught teams to promote for tempo. It never taught them to promote for repair, which needs a different player, one who can absorb ten balls and then hit, and most squads have one and never use him that way.

Batting orders should be a plan for a situation, not a queue.

Most of them are a queue with a story attached.