“There's rarely a contest between bat and ball any more,” England fast bowler Steve Harmison lamented in 2010. “I don't want to see pitches where you can't get bouncers above waist height.”

Harmison, he was well aware, stood to be labelled a “whinger”. But he rather had a point. In 2010, an average of 36 Test runs were scored for every wicket that fell. This average ticked down a little in the following years, but the early 2010s remained halcyon days for Test batting. “Chief executive pitches,” is what Harmison called them.

No longer. The age of 'chief executive wickets' is dead. Now bowlers, once again, are kings. Last year, the average number of runs per wicket was 27 - the lowest figure for 61 years, and a quarter less than the average at the start of this decade. So far in 2019, wickets are falling every 52 balls - more frequently than at any time since 1911. The second highest figure in that time was in 2018.

The world over, pitches have been transformed from those Harmison once railed against. Groundsmen are now generally offering either “grassier surfaces”, helping seamers, or “drier pitches that spin more”, says Ian Bishop, a former West Indies pace bowler who is now a leading commentator. The upshot is “harvesting season for bowlers”, especially as many current Test batsmen developed when pitches were more placid, and they were “unaccustomed to the moving, bouncing at pace, or spinning ball”.

The International Cricket Council - to widespread approval - now looks more favourably on pitches that offer bowlers more approval than, say, five years ago. It may be coincidental but, for home boards in most series - the Ashes is an exception - Tests that last four days are better financially than ones that finish in five. Home advantage - which the World Test Championship will push teams to exploit even more fully - is encouraging teams to prepare wickets that offer abundant assistance to either seam or spin, depending on the home team’s strength.

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Batsmen have not been able to withstand these challenges. In Test cricket, “the management of risk when batting has changed, leading to more wickets lost”, observes Mike Hesson, New Zealand’s coach from 2012 to 2018.

Simple market forces are incentivising young players to devote ever-more of their attention to the shorter versions of the game. And so, rather than reorder their default techniques for limited-overs cricket, now, increasingly, batsmen must reorder their default techniques - and mindsets - for the first-class game.

“Batsmen are learning with an eye on T20 as opposed to wanting to master the red-ball game, which was how it was when I was growing up,” says Chris Rogers, who scored 76 first-class centuries, including five in Tests, and is now Australia’s high-performance batting coach. “It’s a different technique and, more importantly, a different mentality. A combination of going harder at the ball and more aggressive decision-making is making it harder to keep good bowling out.”

Jason Roy is caught behind against Australia credit: action images

Test batsmen have even become far more vulnerable when defending. Since 2006, batsmen are dismissed once every 62 balls when playing a defensive shot against pace, according to CricViz. But in the last two years, batsmen have been dismissed once every 44 balls defending against pace.

Some batsmen who, in another era, may have eventually developed into Test players, now do not give themselves a proper chance. “There’s a smaller pool of top-order batters available and wanting to excel at red ball due to the big-money fun of T20,” reflects Mark Ramprakash, England’s batting coach until this year. He describes a “dumbing down of the art of batting, being able to adapt to different surfaces, back defence and soak up pressure due to T20”.

The world over, batsmen have moved away from the “soft hands, under the eyes approach”, embodied by New Zealand captain Kane Williamson, Bishop believes. The allure of the shorter forms means that young players no longer “strive towards what we used to look at as technical perfection geared towards longevity at the crease”.

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There is also a sense that the gap between Test cricket and what lies beneath has morphed into a chasm, exacerbating the challenge when new batsmen arrive in Tests. The County Championship, like Australia’s Sheffield Shield, has been pushed to the margins of the season while T20 takes centre stage.

First-class cricket has been hollowed out, with many players retiring prematurely from the red-ball game to prioritise T20. These forces impact bowlers as well as batsmen, of course. But the essence of Test cricket - a bowler can recover from a mistake in an innings, but a batsman cannot - means that these changing dynamics have been advantageous to bowlers on the field. “There's been a shift towards more attacking play which increases the margin of error for bowlers,” says the bowling coach Steffan Jones.

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While the relentless schedule initially enervated some fast bowlers, savvy boards have become more adroit at managing quicks, controlling their workloads and identifying when they are entering the ‘red zone’ and at heightened injury risk. Australia, indeed, arrived for the Ashes with not one full pace attack but two. Dale Steyn’s brilliant 15-year Test career was a testament to the virtues of enlightened management: he played well under half of South Africa’s ODIs in this time.

Some of these forces are cyclical. The number of elite bowlers, especially quicks, around today may not be sustained. But lower scores reflect wider and profound changes in the game. Test cricket’s age of dominant bowlers shows no sign of abating.

And so it is time for Test norms to be recalibrated. We often hear that England have only scored 400 once in 36 innings; less familiar is that they have only conceded 400 twice in 34 innings. Perhaps, for Test batsmen, an average in the low 30s should be considered the new 40.