The drinks carrier became a messenger and the laws noticed late

Cricket wrote careful rules about substitute fielders and almost nothing about the tactical briefing that arrives with the water.

Twelfth man jogs out with a tray. Gloves, a towel, six bottles, and a message from the coach about the field for the next two overs. The bottles are the pretext and everyone in the ground understands this, including the umpires, who mostly let it happen.

The laws are detailed about who may substitute, what a substitute may do, and when a player may leave the field. They are notably thin about communication. Coaching from outside the boundary has been contested for years, with the general position that a captain runs the side and the dressing room does not, and the drinks interval punched a hole in that position which has since been widened into a doorway.

I find the inconsistency more interesting than the principle. Football referees will book a manager for coaching from the wrong area of a technical box while a physio delivers instructions in the same breath as a spray can. Tennis banned coaching for decades, enforced it through hand signals nobody could prove, then legalised a limited version because the rule had become a lottery. Cricket sits in between, tolerating an obvious channel because closing it would require an umpire to police the content of a conversation about hydration.

That is the real reason these rules stay soft. Enforcement would require officials to judge speech, and no sport wants a referee deciding whether a sentence about electrolytes was really about the short leg.

The nutritional consequence is not trivial either, and it runs the other way from what you would expect. Because the drinks visit carries tactical value, it happens on the fielding side's schedule rather than the batter's. A batter who wants fluid at a moment that does not suit the bowling side's plan has to wait, and asking for a break in the middle of an over invites the sort of look that stops people asking.

Legalise the message and regulate the interval. Let coaches communicate through a defined channel at defined moments, and then let anyone drink whenever they want without needing an excuse to carry a bottle. The current arrangement gets the worst of it: hidden coaching, and hydration used as its cover story.