The first six overs are really a scouting exercise

Openers are judged on powerplay scoring rate, when their more useful job is finding out what the pitch will do all day.

The powerplay gets discussed almost entirely as a run scoring window. Fielders restricted, hard ball, fast outfield, so hit. That framing is not wrong and it is incomplete, because the first six overs are also the only period in which anybody learns anything about the surface, and the information gathered there governs decisions for the next three hours.

An opener who plays fourteen balls and scores nine has, on the scoreboard, failed. He may also have established that the ball is stopping slightly on this pitch, that the bounce off a length is lower than it looked, and that the shot square of the wicket is not on. If he communicates that to the dressing room, and if the number four believes him, the innings will be built better. That is worth more than the eleven extra runs a more aggressive player would have scored while learning nothing.

The trouble is that nobody gets paid for it. The scorecard records his strike rate and not his intelligence, and the commentary will describe him as scratchy. Over a season this incentive shapes behaviour, which is how you end up with sides where all six batters play the same way and the collective knowledge of the surface after eight overs is roughly zero.

I want to be careful not to romanticise the blocker. A player who takes twenty balls to reach double figures in a twenty over game is a liability regardless of what he learns, because the arithmetic does not forgive him. The version I am defending is narrower. Somebody in the top three should be capable of adjusting after four balls and of saying something useful, rather than executing a preplanned range of shots and hoping.

There is also a pitch reading problem that gets worse under lights, where the surface behaves differently in the first hour than it will at nine o clock, so the information has a short shelf life and must be updated.

The best sides I have watched treat the powerplay as an experiment with an aggressive bias. Attack, yes, but attack in a way that generates data. Play one shot square early to see if the ball comes on. If it does not, everything after is easier, and the team knew it before the opposition did.