The wide yorker has stopped paying its way at the death

It was the percentage ball for a decade, but the ramp and a fielder at deep point have turned it into a coin flip.

Two overs left, batter set, and the seamer runs in aiming at the tramline outside off with a full length. For years that was the safest thing a bowler could do with a hard white ball. It is now, at best, an even bet, and I would not have it as anybody's default.

The delivery was never actually unhittable. It was geometry. A yorker aimed a foot outside off makes the batter reach, which cramps the swing arc he needs for a straight hit, and it takes the whole leg side out of play unless he can somehow get underneath it. Against a batter who only scored through the line, that was close to a free dot ball.

Two things ate it. The first is that a generation of players now practises hitting behind the wicket on purpose. The ramp, the scoop, the open-faced slap over short third. None of those shots need a free swing. They need timing and the pace the bowler brings, which the wide yorker supplies in full. The second is that the margin has always been tiny and the punishment for missing is asymmetric. A fraction wider is a wide and a free ball. A fraction shorter is a half volley on a length the batter can free his arms at.

So the bowler is aiming at a corridor perhaps six inches across, under lights, with a damp ball, with a heart rate somewhere north of one seventy. Nobody hits that reliably. The ones who look as though they do are usually mixing it with something else and getting credit for the yorker on the balls that happened not to go for four.

What I would rather see is the hard length ball banged into the pitch at the hip, with a deep square leg and a long leg posted for it. It is uglier. It concedes more twos. But the mishit off a cramped pull carries to a fielder far more often than a mistimed ramp finds a hand, because the ramp is designed to travel to the one part of the ground where nobody stands.

There is a version of this argument that says the slower ball already replaced the yorker. I think that is half right, and the other half is dangerous, because a slower ball misread on a small ground is six.

Bowl the awkward one. Accept the two.