Everyone watches the powerplay and the game is decided later

The overs when the ring spreads and the sixth bowler has to get through his spell are where most limited overs matches are actually lost.

Broadcast coverage treats the opening overs as the main event. Bright graphics, run rate comparisons, a lot of noise about intent. Then the restrictions ease, the fielders go out, the pace comes off, and the analysis wanders off to talk about something else for forty minutes while the match is quietly decided.

Here is why that middle passage matters more than it looks. Once the ring opens, the boundary becomes hard to find and the scoring shifts to placement and running, which means the batting side must take risks against the bowlers a captain least wants to use. Nearly every side has five bowlers it trusts and a gap it has to fill, whether that is a part-timer, an all-rounder having a poor season, or a fifth bowler who is really a fourth. Those overs are the hole in the plan.

Good batting sides attack the hole deliberately. They identify the vulnerable bowler in the first innings, work out when the captain must bowl him, and organise their whole innings so their best players of that particular type of bowling are set and in when he comes on. That is planning at a level of detail supporters rarely see, and it happens in team meetings rather than on the field.

The defending captain's counter is equally invisible. He hides the weak bowler in short bursts, uses him against a new batter rather than a set one, and sometimes burns his best spinner early against the danger man knowing it leaves a problem for later. Watching a captain manage that shortage over thirty overs is more interesting than anything that happens in the first ten, if anyone would bother to explain it.

My complaint about coverage is not just aesthetic. If the audience is only ever taught to value boundaries and strike rates in the first six overs, then that is what young players practise, and we get a generation excellent at slog sweeping the powerplay and clueless about rotating strike against a defensive field.

Match awareness is a skill and it is taught by what we celebrate.

Celebrate the twenty-eight from thirty balls that broke the fifth bowler and nobody remembers.