A wicket in the middle overs is worth two at the death

Bowling averages treat all dismissals as equal, which badly undervalues the spinner who removes a set batter in the eleventh over.

Take a bowler who takes two wickets in the fifteenth and sixteenth overs of a chase and one who takes two in the nineteenth. Same figures. Same average, same strike rate, same line on the scorecard. The first bowler has probably decided the match and the second has probably tidied up a result already settled.

The value of a dismissal is the difference between what the batter at the crease would have done and what his replacement will do. Remove a set batter with forty off twenty-five in the fifteenth and you replace him with someone facing his first delivery, who then has to accelerate immediately, with roughly thirty balls left in which to fail. Remove a tailender in the nineteenth and you have swapped one man who could not have scored many for another who cannot either.

This is not a subtle effect and it is not new, yet almost every published bowling number ignores it. Averages, economy, strike rates. All of them treat the twenty overs of an innings as interchangeable, when the run value of a single ball moves by a factor of three between the seventh over and the nineteenth.

The consequence I care about is who gets picked. Middle-over spinners, particularly the ones who bowl into the pitch and take their wickets off mishits rather than beaten edges, look mediocre in every column that reaches a selection meeting. Economy of seven and a half. Average in the low thirties. They also happen to be the bowlers who break partnerships at the exact moment breaking a partnership is worth the most.

The fix is not complicated. Score every wicket against the expected remaining runs of the dismissed batter, given his balls faced and the match state, and score it against the expected remaining runs of the man arriving. Publish that as a season total. It would reorder the value rankings of most competitions and it would be uncomfortable for a few reputations.

Nobody will do it, because the scorecard is a hundred and fifty years old and it is the format everyone can read.

I would settle for commentators saying that the eleventh over wicket was the game, and meaning it as arithmetic rather than as atmosphere.