Consistency is the wrong first lesson with a new ball

Hitting the same spot repeatedly is a fine skill and a poor plan for the six overs when the ball is doing most.

Line and length. Every coaching manual, every net session, every fielding side's captain shouting from slip. Put it there enough times and something will happen.

For a bowler in the fifteenth over, that is right. For a bowler holding a new ball, it is close to a waste of the only period in the innings where the ball has help, and I would like to see the instruction change.

Here is the reasoning. A new ball swings and seams because it is hard and the lacquer is intact, and those effects have a life measured in a handful of overs. The value of a delivery in that window comes from what the ball does in the air and off the pitch, not from where it is aimed, and a bowler hitting the same length every ball allows a batter to solve one problem exactly once. He works out the bounce, he sets his trigger movement for that length, and thereafter he is playing every delivery from a position he has already calibrated.

Vary the length by a yard, deliberately, and the calibration never settles. The half volley he drives on the up is followed by one two feet shorter that catches the top of the bat, and neither ball needed to be unplayable. It only needed to be different from the last one while the surface was still offering something.

The counterargument is strong and I want to state it fairly. Length variation without control leaks boundaries, and a bowler who sprays it in the first over of a chase hands over momentum that is genuinely hard to win back. True. But the same bowler bowling a metronomic sixth stump line for six overs concedes fewer runs and takes nothing, and then somebody says he bowled beautifully and deserved more, which is the phrase that should trigger suspicion every time it appears.

Deserved more is usually a description of a bowler who repeated himself.

Save the consistency for the ball that is thirty overs old and doing nothing, when containment is genuinely the job and the plan is to make somebody impatient. In the first spell, ask a different question every ball.