Giving a toss

In the first Test, at Melbourne in 1877, Australia won the toss and elected to bat. They won. With careful preparation of the pitch to suit the home team, winning the toss has come to be seen as tantamount to winning the match. So for two years now English county cricket has given the visiting team the choice of batting or fielding first. Is it a good idea to extend the change to Test cricket? Or perhaps the toss of a coin could be extended from cricket to more of daily life. The dangers are obvious. In the Seventies novel The Dice Man, the hero decides how to behave by the fall of the dice, and is led into some pretty unpleasant activities. Yet casting lots, we are told, was the means of choosing the Apostle to replace Judas Iscariot. Seeing the way politics is going, it might be tried as a way of choosing parties and their policies.