Every boundary statistic quietly assumes all grounds are the same size

Cricket compares hitting numbers across venues whose playing areas differ by dozens of metres, and pretends the comparison is fair.

Football pitches vary a little. Tennis courts do not vary at all. Cricket grounds vary enormously, and the sport keeps producing boundary statistics as though they did not.

A square boundary of fifty five metres and one of eighty two metres are both legal, both common, and both feed the same column in the same table. A batter who plays half his cricket at a small, round ground and a batter who plays at a long, oval one are being measured against each other on a number that is partly a property of the architecture. Nobody adjusts for it. Occasionally somebody mentions it on commentary as a curiosity, then moves on to compare their boundary percentages.

The effect is not marginal. The difference between a straight boundary of sixty metres and seventy five metres is roughly the difference between a mishit clearing the rope and a mishit being caught at long on, which is the difference between a career as a power hitter and a career as a man who gets out to the same shot. Same swing, same contact, different postcode.

It gets worse with the oval grounds, where the square boundary is short and the straight one is long, or the reverse. That shape does not just change how many sixes get hit. It changes which shots are worth playing, which means it changes what a batter practises, which means a player developed at one kind of ground arrives at another with the wrong instincts and gets described as being out of form.

I would like to see boundary numbers published with a venue adjustment, the way runs are adjusted in other sports for the environment they were scored in. The data exists. Grounds are measured before every match. It would take somebody about a fortnight to build and it would immediately change how a handful of reputations look.

The objection will be that adjusting for ground size punishes a batter for succeeding where he plays, which is unfair to him. Fine. Publish both. What is not defensible is a single unadjusted number treated as a property of the player, when a measurable share of it belongs to a groundsman who painted a circle in a particular place.

Nobody would accept a bowling average that ignored whether the pitch was grass or dust. This is the same error, sitting in plain sight.