Consistency is a bowler's ceiling as often as it is his floor

Hitting the same spot repeatedly keeps an economy rate down, and against a set batter it stops being a threat.

There is a bowler in every side who never goes for runs and never takes wickets, and coaches keep calling him reliable.

The virtue of a repeatable line and length is real. It gives a captain a field he can trust, it stops an innings from running away, and at junior levels it is the fastest route to being picked. Bowl top of off often enough and the batter will eventually play at one he should have left. That is a genuine plan.

It stops working against a good player who has been in for forty minutes. He has seen the length. His feet know exactly how far forward to go, his hands know where the ball will be, and once a batter has calibrated to a length he will not be beaten by it again unless the surface changes. At that point every repetition of your best ball is one more free rehearsal for him.

So the question I would ask any bowler in his mid twenties is not can you hit the spot. It is what do you do on the ball after you have hit it four times. The good answers are all disruptions of one variable while the others hold. Same length, different width. Same width, two yards fuller. Same everything, four kilometres slower out of the same action. The wobble seam ball is popular precisely because it disrupts the one variable the bowler cannot control anyway, which is which way it goes off the pitch, and it lets him keep his relentless line while removing the batter's certainty about the outcome.

My objection is to how we coach the trade-off. We tell young bowlers that variation is what you earn after mastering consistency, and by the time they have mastered consistency they are twenty-six and terrified of bowling a bad ball. The bad ball is part of the cost. A bowler who never concedes a boundary in an over has probably not asked a serious question in that over either.

Look at any attack that runs through a side on a flat surface. Somebody in it bowled something unusual, took a risk, and got the breakthrough. Somebody else at the other end held the line so that risk was affordable. Both jobs are needed. Only one of them ends up in the highlights, and only one of them wins matches.