Dew decides more night games than anything a captain does

In a day-night limited-overs match the second innings is often played with a wet ball, and everybody plans around it beforehand.

Watch a fielder in the eighteenth over of a night chase in Chennai or Colombo. He is not drying his hands. He is wringing out a towel that the fourth umpire keeps bringing on, and the bowler is trying to grip a ball that has been rolling through wet grass for an hour.

Dew is the largest single variable in subcontinental white-ball cricket and it is almost entirely predictable. Clear sky, light wind, temperature falling towards the dew point after sunset. Grounds staff know by mid-afternoon whether it is coming. So do both captains. Which is why the coin toss in these matches barely functions as a decision at all. Everybody bowls first, or wants to, and half the field has already conceded the match to physics before a ball is bowled.

The mechanism is unglamorous. A wet ball does not grip the pitch, so spin drops off sharply. Seam movement fades because the shine cannot be kept by hand. The ball comes on to the bat straighter and faster. Meanwhile the bowler's run-up gets slick and his fingers slip at release, which costs him yorkers first and slower balls second, the two deliveries he most needs in the last five overs. A total that looked twenty above par at the innings break becomes chaseable, and the chasing side did nothing to earn it.

Boards have tried patches. Spraying the outfield with anti-dew chemicals. Mopping with ropes dragged between drinks. Substituting a dry ball, which is closer to a fudge than a fix, because a fresh ball changes reverse swing and hardness at the same time. None of it works well enough to make the second innings comparable to the first.

My view is that we should stop pretending this is a fair contest and schedule around it. Play the marquee day-night fixtures in venues and months where dew is unlikely, put the rest back to afternoon starts, and accept the smaller broadcast audience as the price of a real contest.

Nobody will do that, obviously, because the lights are the product. So the least we can do is stop congratulating a captain for calling heads.