The yorker stopped being a safe ball and captains have not adjusted

Batters now premeditate against the delivery bowlers were told to trust, which makes the field setting the real problem.

A well bowled yorker at the death used to be close to unhittable. It is now a scoring option, and the bowlers know it long before the captains do.

Two things changed. Batters started moving before the ball was released, opening the base and clearing the front leg so that a ball at the toes becomes a ball under the swinging arc, which is exactly where a modern bat sends it a long way. And the ramp arrived, which turned the full straight delivery into a boundary behind the wicket where, in most fields, nobody is standing. The delivery did not get worse. Its consequences did.

What has not changed is the coaching. Death bowlers are still taught that the yorker is the primary and everything else is a variation, and the phrase used is still that you cannot go wrong with a yorker. You very much can. Miss it by six inches and it is a low full toss, which is the single worst ball in the game, or a half volley, which is nearly as bad. The margin was always thin. The punishment for missing it has roughly doubled while the reward for hitting it has fallen.

My complaint is aimed at the field rather than the bowler. If a batter is premeditating a ramp, the answer is not a better yorker. It is a fielder behind square on the leg side and an instruction to bowl the ball he has now made difficult to ramp, which is the wide slower one, and to accept the two singles that come with it. Captains hate this because it looks passive. It is not passive. It is refusing to bowl into a shot that has been rehearsed all week.

The bouncer is the other half of the answer and is still underused at the death, mostly because a mistimed one goes for six over the keeper and looks awful. A mistimed yorker goes for six too, and looks like bad luck, which tells you the whole thing is about how a mistake is perceived rather than how often it happens.

I want to see a bowler at the death whose first ball is a slower bouncer and whose sixth is a yorker, in that order. Almost every side still does it the other way round.

Then complains about the last two overs.