Consistency is a defensive virtue captains mistake for an attacking one

Hitting the same spot forty times in a row builds pressure but does not, by itself, take wickets.

There is a certain kind of spell that gets praised on air and achieves nothing. Forty balls, same length, same line, batter leaving or defending, figures reading eight overs for eleven runs, and not one moment when a dismissal was actually close.

Consistency is a real skill and I am not about to argue otherwise. What I object to is the assumption that it is an attacking one. Landing the ball in the same place repeatedly does two things well. It stops runs, because a batter cannot score off a good length outside off without taking a risk, and it builds the frustration that makes him take that risk later. Both are pressure functions. Both work through the batter's patience rather than through his technique.

A wicket taking ball is usually different. It is fuller than the ball before it, or wider, or slower, or it is the one that follows a bouncer. The dismissal comes from the change, and the change only works because the preceding twenty were the same. Which means the consistent bowler is generating the conditions for a wicket and then, quite often, failing to cash them in because he is being praised for the consistency itself and has no intention of breaking it.

I see this most with bowlers who have been drilled hard on discipline as juniors. They arrive with beautiful control and no instinct for the moment to abandon it. The batter has played eleven dot balls, he is leaning forward, he is committed to the front foot, and this is the exact moment to bowl a length back of a length or slide one across him. Instead they bowl the good ball again, which he now expects and blocks, and the tension they built quietly leaks away.

The captain owns part of this. If your bowler has landed sixteen in a row on the same coin, tell him to waste one. Genuinely waste it, a foot outside off with no field for it, because the batter's next assumption is the thing you are attacking.

Economy rate is the easiest number to admire and the least connected to winning a Test match. A bowler who goes for four an over and takes four wickets has beaten the one who went for two and took one, every time, and nobody says so loudly enough.