Consistency is only worth having because of the ball that breaks it

Bowling the same delivery over and over is not the point; it is the setup that makes one different delivery unplayable.

Line and length gets talked about as a virtue in itself, as though the ideal bowler is a machine that lands every ball on a coin. If that were true the most successful bowlers in history would be the most metronomic ones, and they are not. What consistency actually buys you is a batter's expectation, and expectation is the thing you then betray.

Think about what a batter does after eighteen balls on the same length. He stops watching the ball out of the hand quite so carefully. He does not decide to, and if you asked him he would deny it. But his trigger movement starts a fraction earlier, his weight commits a fraction sooner, and his bat path is now built around a ball that is going to pitch in a particular place. He has been trained, gently, over three overs.

Then you bowl one two feet fuller. The same batter who has been driving comfortably all morning is now reaching for it, because his front foot went where it always goes and the ball did not. That is the wicket. It was not a better delivery than the eighteen before it. It was worse, in isolation, and it worked entirely because of them.

So the interesting question for a bowler is not how tight can I be but how much variation can I afford before the setup stops working. My instinct is that most bowlers in limited overs cricket now vary too much. Four different balls in an over means the batter never settles into a pattern, which sounds clever, and mostly means he watches every ball hard and takes each on its merits. You have made yourself unpredictable and simultaneously harmless.

In the longer format the discipline is easier to see because the reward is delayed. A spell of eight overs that yields nothing and then a wicket in the ninth is a good spell, and the first eight overs did the work.

The corollary nobody likes is that the setup can be wasted by a captain. Three overs of building an expectation, then a bowling change, and the new man starts from zero against a batter whose feet have been reset. Which is why I think spells are shortened too casually, and why the numbers that judge a bowler over by over will always miss the most interesting thing he does.