The real gamble is picking a side before you know who bats

Teams are named at the toss, which means the eleven is chosen blind and the coin then rewards or punishes the guess.

Team sheets are exchanged at the toss. Which means every selection decision is made without knowing whether you will bat first, and the conversation about who won the toss almost never mentions this, though it is the more interesting half of the problem.

Think about what a captain is actually doing. He is choosing between an extra bowler and an extra batter, or between a second spinner and a third seamer, on a surface that will behave differently in the fourth innings than the first, and he must commit before the coin decides which of those innings he plays first. On a pitch expected to deteriorate, the correct eleven for batting first is not the correct eleven for chasing. He picks one and then finds out.

This is why I find the toss debate slightly misdirected. People argue about whether winning it is worth runs, and the honest answer is that it depends enormously on the venue, but the underlying unfairness is that the loser of the toss is also stuck with a side built for a scenario he no longer has. Two penalties, one coin.

There is a way sides hedge, and the good ones do it deliberately. Pick players whose value does not depend much on the order of innings. An all rounder is worth more than his parts here, not because of what he contributes but because he reduces the variance of the selection itself. A batting side that picks a fourth seamer who can hold a bat is buying insurance against having guessed wrong at nine in the morning.

The alternative, which some domestic competitions have tried and which I would like to see more widely, is naming the eleven after the toss, or letting the away side choose to bat with no coin at all. The second is neater. It removes the lottery entirely and gives the disadvantage of travel a small compensation, which seems fair enough.

What I do not accept is the traditionalist line that the coin is part of the charm. Charm is a poor reason to let a random event apply itself twice, first to the batting order and then, invisibly, to a team selection made in the dark two hours earlier.