The rope has crept in and the fielding side never adjusted

Shorter square boundaries changed which mishits carry, and captains are still setting fields designed for a bigger ground.

Stand behind the bowler's arm at a modern venue and look at the square boundary. Then look at where the advertising hoardings and the seats actually are. The gap between rope and fence is often ten or fifteen yards of unused grass, taken out of play for safety, for camera positions, for the pitchside furniture that a broadcast requires.

Nobody is doing anything sinister. The consequence is still enormous and it has not been priced in.

A mishit pull off the bottom half of the bat is a fielding chance on a seventy-yard square boundary and a six on a sixty-yard one. That is the whole margin. The shot is identical, the contact is identical, and the outcome swings by six runs and a wicket. Once that is true, the batter's calculation changes completely, because the downside of the loose pull has mostly been deleted while the upside stayed the same.

What I do not understand is why fields have not changed to match. Captains still set square boundary protection as though the rope were where it was fifteen years ago, with one man back on each side and the rest in the ring. On a short square boundary that man is decoration. He covers a narrow slice of a fence that a batter can clear from four different positions in his stance.

The honest response is to stop defending the short side at all and force everything to the long one. Bowl wide of off with a packed off-side field, concede the tuck to leg, and accept that a batter who wants the short boundary has to fetch the ball from outside the tramline to get there. That is a harder shot than a pull, and it is the shot you would rather he played.

Very few teams do this, and I suspect the reason is that it looks negative. A captain who posts six on one side gets asked why he is being defensive. A captain who posts a symmetrical field and concedes eighty off the last five overs gets sympathy for a bad day.

There is a second casualty worth naming. Ground dimensions are almost never published in a form anyone can compare, so every analysis of six-hitting quietly assumes all grounds are the same size.

They are not even the same size week to week at the same ground. The rope moves. Nobody writes it down.