Good length belongs to the batter, not the pitch

A length that is perfect against a tall player is a half volley to a short one, and team plans rarely say so.

Bowling coaches paint a rectangle on the pitch and tell everyone to hit it. On a good day the whole attack does, and afterwards the analysts produce a pitch map with a satisfying cluster in the right area, and everybody agrees the discipline was excellent.

Then a batter who is five feet six makes a hundred out of that cluster, because the cluster was never calibrated to him.

Length is not a property of the surface. It is the point where a ball becomes awkward for a specific person to play forward or back, and that point depends on how far the batter can reach and how high the ball will come off the pitch to his hands. A tall batter with a long stride can get to a fuller ball and smother it, so the awkward zone sits shorter. A shorter batter reaches less far, so the same ball is a driving length, but he also plays under a ball that would take the shoulder of a taller player's bat, so the short end of the zone moves too. The whole window slides, and it can slide by more than a foot between two players in the same order.

Very few team plans encode this. They encode the bowler's plan, which is a length the bowler is comfortable repeating, and then the field is set for the shot that length produces against an average human being.

What I would want on the analyst's sheet is one number per opposition batter. Not a heat map, which nobody reads properly in a huddle. A number. Bowl this many centimetres fuller to him than to the last one. That is actionable at the top of a run up in a way that a coloured square is not.

There is a related trap in comparing bowlers between series. A bowler whose length was ideal against a tall top order will show a worse average against a short one without having changed a thing, and he will spend the winter being told he has lost his rhythm.

The pitch map is a picture of consistency. It is not a picture of quality, and it never was, because the target moves every time somebody new walks out.