They’re not going to toss a coin before Big Bash League matches, they’re going to toss a bat and call either “hills” or “flats.”

This is stupid and therefore brilliant because when it comes to T20 cricket in particular, stupid and brilliant are the exact same thing. It is also excellent news for those of us who feel that coins have held too much sway over society for far too long.

According to Wikipedia, the first coins were developed in Iron Age Anatolia, in what is now Turkey, in around the 7th and 6th centuries BC. Despite recent challenges from notes and contactless, the stubborn bastards still haven’t entirely gone out of fashion.

(We actually have a Turkish currency anecdote. We went to Istanbul when we were about 20 and accepted a kind parental offer of a million lira in coins that they had left over from a previous holiday. Neither they nor us thought to check how much this was in pound sterling. It turned out to be about a quid, so upon our arrival, we swiftly changed a larger sum of money and paid for everything in notes until our very last day. On that last day, we tried to use up the coins by buying kebabs and other street food and somehow came away with more than we could carry. Apparently street food was extraordinarily cheap in Istanbul back then and we really wish we’d made that discovery on day one. (Sub-anecdote: When we gave the guy at the bureau de change place fifty quid, he picked up a huge stack of notes and rapidly started counting them out, saying, “million, million, million, million…” When your mathematically-puny mind has spent the last few weeks laboriously grappling with any number of different exchange rates, this sort of thing triggers an instant and extremely heartfelt sigh-and-eye-roll combo. We just went for ‘one million = one pound’ in the end, which was close enough – although we still had to be extremely careful when counting zeros on menus.))

Hopefully cricket bats getting in on pre-match ceremonies is a statement of intent from them. Perhaps even an act of war. We would therefore like to take this opportunity to side with them in the ensuing conflict.

There’s a Bologna newspaper called Il Resto del Carlino, which means “the change you get from a Carlino.” A Carlino was the smallest unit of the local currency a hundred-or-so years ago, but for some reason people sometimes priced things at less than that. This meant that it wasn’t always possible to give people actual change, so they instead gave people a page of local news. (If only we could flog pages of King Cricket for such a hefty amount.)

We propose that all smaller units of currency – cents, pence, paise and the like – are abolished and instead replaced with cricket bats. Coins have had it their own way for long enough and the pocket industry could also do with a bit of stimulus and cricket-bats-as-change would surely provide this.