Consistency is a compliment we pay to bowlers who are easy to face

Hitting the same spot repeatedly builds excellent figures and lets a set batter stop making decisions.

There is a particular kind of bowler who ends a season with an economy rate everybody admires and a wicket column nobody mentions. He lands it on a length outside off stump, over after over, and the batters at the other end play him with the middle of the bat and no discomfort at all. He is described as consistent, which is meant as praise, and I have come to hear it as a diagnosis.

Batting is a decision problem. Every delivery requires a judgement about length and line, and that judgement is made under time pressure from partial information. A bowler who repeats himself removes the problem. By the fourth ball the batter no longer needs to decide anything; he trusts the pattern, and trust converts a difficult task into a comfortable one. The bowler has done all the work of accuracy and then handed the benefit to the other man.

What causes trouble is a small, unpredictable variation around a good length. Not a bad ball. Nine inches fuller than the last one, with the same seam position and the same speed, is enough to make a batter play at something he intended to leave. The great line-and-length bowlers were never metronomes. They were extremely accurate bowlers who deliberately missed by small amounts, which is a much harder skill and one that no bowling analysis records.

Here is where the coaching goes wrong. Target practice with cones rewards the tightest cluster, so young bowlers are trained toward a single point, and by the time they are professionals their variation has been drilled out of them. Then somebody in an analysis meeting notes that their false shot rate is low and suggests they need a new delivery, and off they go to learn a slower ball nobody asked for.

The wobble-seam ball became popular for exactly this reason. It gives a bowler variation he does not have to control and cannot predict, which is a confession that the variation matters more than the precision.

I would rather have a bowler who occasionally misses than one who never does. The one who never misses is safe. Safe is what a batter wants from the other end.