Two-over spells are quietly wrecking new-ball bowlers

Fragmenting an opening bowler's work into short bursts looks like careful management and may be the most damaging thing in his week.

A fast bowler who bowls two overs, sits for twenty five minutes, bowls two more, sits again, and then comes back at the death has bowled six overs. Nobody would call that a heavy day. His body would disagree, and the reason is that he warmed up three times and cooled down three times, and the dangerous part of fast bowling is not the tenth ball of a spell. It is the first.

The mechanics are unforgiving. A bowling action puts several times body weight through the front leg at delivery, and the tissue that has to tolerate that load performs best when it is warm and has been progressively loaded. The first ball of a spell is the one where the athlete is least prepared and most likely to overreach, particularly if he is being asked to hit top pace immediately because the situation demands it.

Short format cricket has made this the norm rather than the exception. The bowler is a resource to be spent in blocks, allocated by matchups and by field restrictions, and the idea of a long rhythmic spell has almost disappeared from the shorter game. It survives in the longer format, which is why some of us keep arguing that four day cricket is protective rather than punishing for quicks, an argument that sounds backwards until you count spell starts rather than overs.

The counting change is the point. Overs bowled is the number in every workload system. Spell starts is the number that matters and it is trivially available from any scorecard.

There is a limit to how far this can be pushed as policy. Captains cannot bowl their best quick in one continuous burst when the game situation calls for him twice, and a bowler held back for the eighteenth over is being held back for a good reason. Nobody is going to reorganise a run chase around a hamstring.

But the training week can absorb some of it. If a bowler will start three spells on Saturday, he should be starting three on Wednesday, with the cooling in between, rather than rolling through eight continuous overs in the nets and calling it equivalent. Almost nobody does this, because nets are organised around batters.

The whole discipline is built for the convenience of the man holding the bat. It always has been. The bowler is scenery.