Let the visiting captain choose and scrap the toss

Handing the decision to the away side would remove the luck and quietly punish the worst pitch preparation.

A coin decides which of two teams gets the conditions it wants. We have accepted this for so long that the strangeness of it has worn off, and the strangeness is considerable, because in no other part of the sport do we allow randomness to allocate an advantage of that size before a ball is bowled.

The size varies, which is the awkward part. On a genuinely even surface the toss is worth almost nothing and nobody should care. On a pitch that will crumble, or under lights where the ball will do different things in the second innings, the toss can be worth more than any single player on either team. So we have a random device whose importance is itself variable and unknown in advance.

The proposal that keeps coming back, borrowed from county cricket, is to give the visiting captain the choice outright. He can bowl if he wants it. Otherwise a toss happens as normal. It sounds like a small administrative tweak and I think it is the most useful structural change available to the longer format.

What it actually does is change the incentives of the people preparing the surface. If the home side knows the away captain gets first refusal, there is no percentage in producing a pitch that offers a huge first innings advantage, because the visitors will simply take it. The rational home preparation becomes a surface that rewards the better team over four innings, which is the pitch everyone claims to want and almost nobody is incentivised to produce.

The objection is that home advantage is legitimate, part of the fabric, and that touring sides are supposed to adapt. I agree with the first half. Home advantage should live in familiarity, crowd, conditions the local players grew up in. It should not live in a curator being told what result his board would prefer.

There is a version of this I like even more and nobody will adopt. Both captains write their choice down. If they agree, the coin decides. If they disagree, they both get what they asked for, which is only possible if they wanted different things, and if they wanted the same thing then the pitch was probably too one sided anyway.

The coin is the laziest part of the day. Retire it.