Scrapping the toss would not fix what people think it fixes

Handing the visiting captain the choice changes who prepares the pitch, but it does nothing about the conditions that actually decide games.

Hand the visiting captain the choice and the groundsman starts behaving differently. That is the whole theory behind abolishing the toss, and as theories go it is a sound one. County cricket ran the experiment for several seasons and the pitches did get flatter, or at least less obviously loaded. Good. But the toss argument was never really about pitch preparation.

Think about where a coin flip actually costs a team the match. It is not the surface that sits there for five days doing roughly what everyone expected. It is the conditions that move. A morning with cloud sitting low and the ball hooping for two hours before the sun burns it off. A day-nighter where dew arrives at the eightieth minute and the spinner might as well be bowling with a bar of soap. In those games the toss is worth an enormous amount, and giving the choice to the away captain simply transfers the windfall rather than removing it.

So you have solved the smaller problem loudly and left the bigger one alone.

I would go further. The uncontested choice creates its own distortion, because a home board that knows the visitors will bowl first has an incentive to prepare a surface that punishes bowling first, which is exactly the manipulation the rule was written to stop. You have not removed the incentive. You have inverted it and told everyone it is fixed.

The honest fixes are duller and nobody wants them. Independent pitch inspectors with real authority, appointed by the governing body rather than the host. Published preparation logs, so a curator who rolls a surface for four days and then leaves eight millimetres of grass on it has to explain himself in public. Scheduling that stops putting limited-overs matches into venues and months where dew is a certainty. None of that makes a headline.

There is also a case, which I hold more weakly, that the toss is good television. Two captains, a coin, thirty seconds of genuine consequence before a ball is bowled. Sport is allowed to keep a little arbitrary drama.

What I object to is the pretence. Abolishing the toss is a governance gesture aimed at a governance problem, dressed up as a fairness reform. If you want fair, fix the surfaces and fix the calendar. The coin is the least dishonest thing on the field.