The watering can decides more matches than the toss

How much moisture a groundsman leaves in a square on the morning of a match sets the ceiling on everything that follows.

A groundsman makes one judgement between about six and nine in the morning, and it is the most consequential unwatched decision in the sport. How much water goes on. Whether the covers come off early to let the surface breathe or stay on to hold the sweat in. Whether the heavy roller gets ten minutes or twenty. Nobody films it. Everybody spends the next eight hours discussing its consequences as if they were the players' doing.

Moisture works on a clay square in two directions at once. Water in the top few millimetres keeps the surface soft, so the ball grips and seams, and it keeps the particles bound, so the surface does not break up. Take the water away and you lose the grip but you also lose the binding, which is why a dry square starts flat and finishes cracked. Every pitch is somewhere along that curve on the first morning, and where it starts largely determines how fast it travels.

The part people underrate is the rate of loss. A square with high clay content holds water deep and gives it up slowly, so day one looks tacky and day four still has something underneath. A sandier profile dries from the bottom up and can go from seaming to lifeless inside two sessions. Same visible colour. Wildly different match.

Which is my complaint about pitch reporting. It is almost entirely visual. Grass cover, a fingernail pressed into the surface, a comment about how it looks a good toss to win. None of that measures the thing that matters, which is water content at depth and how quickly it will leave. Moisture probes are cheap and have been for years. Publishing a reading at the start of play would tell a viewer more than every close-up of a crack ever broadcast.

There is a fairness argument too. Home advantage in cricket is not cheating, it is a legitimate feature of a sport played on soil, and I have no problem with a curator preparing a surface that suits his bowlers. I do have a problem with the away side, the broadcaster and the betting public all guessing at a variable the home camp can measure precisely.

Publish the number. Let everyone argue about the same fact for once.