The wicket ball is usually the one before it

Dismissals get credited to the delivery that hit the stumps, which is the least interesting ball in the sequence.

Watch a wicket back at full speed and the temptation is to admire the delivery that got it. Beautiful ball. Nipped away, took the edge. Everyone claps.

Now watch the three before it. That is where the work happened, and almost nothing in cricket's record keeping acknowledges those three deliveries exist.

A right hander edging to slip has usually been moved there. The bowler went straighter for a couple, the batter's front foot started planting across, and then the ball that did the damage was pitched in the same place and allowed to leave him. Nothing about the wicket ball was special. Its power came from being different in a way the previous ones made available.

This is why bowling figures are such a blunt account of bowling. Three for forty tells you outcomes and hides sequence entirely. Two bowlers can produce identical figures while one built every dismissal over an over and a half and the other was gifted a slog and a stumping off a full toss. Everyone in the dressing room knows which is which. The scorecard has no vocabulary for it.

The number I would want, if someone with the ball tracking data would build it, is a setup index. For each dismissal, look at the previous four deliveries from that bowler to that batter and measure how far the wicket ball deviated from them in length, line and pace. A big deviation after a tight cluster means the bowler manufactured it. A wicket ball that looks exactly like the four before it means the batter made a mistake and the bowler happened to be there.

Both count on the card. Only one is repeatable, and the difference matters enormously in selection, because a bowler who manufactures dismissals will do it again on a flat pitch in a different country and a bowler who collects errors will not.

There is a coaching version of this too. Bowlers who learn in an environment obsessed with dot balls tend to bowl the same delivery repeatedly, which is exactly the pattern that makes the following delivery useless.

Six balls, one plan, and the fifth is the one that matters. The other five are the argument.