The toss is not the unfairness worth fixing

Every few years somebody proposes scrapping the coin, which would tidy up a small injustice and leave a much larger one alone.

The argument for abolishing the toss goes like this. On some surfaces the advantage of batting first, or of bowling in the first hour under cloud, is worth more than any selection decision either captain makes, and awarding it on a coin is absurd. Let the away captain choose. Problem solved.

I am not convinced the problem is the coin. The coin is only worth something because of the conditions it distributes, and those conditions are set by a curator working for one of the two teams. Handing the choice to the visiting captain does not remove that. It just changes which lever the home camp pulls. Prepare a surface that is unpleasant in both directions and the choice becomes a choice between two bad options, which is not fairness, it is the appearance of fairness.

There is also a cost to removing the coin that its opponents skip past. The toss creates a decision under uncertainty that a captain has to justify afterwards, and those decisions are a genuine part of the contest. A captain who bowls first on a surface that flattens out by lunch has made a mistake everyone can see and argue about. Take that away and you have removed one of the few moments in a five day match where a single human judgement is visibly graded.

What I would rather see addressed is the scheduling that produces the imbalance in the first place. Day-night matches where the ball moves dramatically for two hours under lights and not at all in the afternoon create a bigger gap than any coin ever did, and that gap is entirely a product of a broadcast slot. So does a tournament that plays semi-finals at different venues with different dew patterns, which is close to a lottery conducted a week in advance.

Dew, in short-format cricket, is worth more than the toss and is fixed by nobody. A captain winning a coin at seven in the evening in a humid city is not winning a coin, he is being handed a match.

Fix the fixture list and the schedule. The coin is the least dishonest thing in the whole arrangement.