It is a misconception every pitch in the County Championship is a green seamer.
Certainly there are plenty of pitches that favour slow-medium-pacers, but the lazy assumption that a wily bowler like Darren Stevens, formerly of Kent, would take all the wickets on any domestic surface is wrong.
There are good, flat batting surfaces on the circuit. The thing that is so different to international cricket is the lack of bounce.
A tall, hit-the-deck bowler like Carse is not going to be as effective on pitches that do not bounce, regardless of whether they are flat or not. Carse even highlighted the bounce in the Christchurch pitch as a factor in his success.
The time groundstaff have between county games is not sufficient to prepare and roll a pitch to the hardness of an international surface. A Test pitch is loved and nurtured for weeks, if not months, before it is used. It feels as though domestic pitches have to be whipped up out of necessity, rather than curation.
The other issue is the whereabouts on the square a Championship match is played. You might think that one part of the square is the same as another, but it does make a difference.
Pitches in the middle of the square are usually reserved for internationals, T20 Blast matches, Hundred games, if a county is lucky to be a host, or other televised matches, because of where the camera and stump mic equipment sits.
Therefore, Championship matches are pushed to the edge of the square, which often results in a miniscule boundary on one side.
By their very nature, tall and fast bowlers can leak runs and are more likely to if there is a postage-stamp boundary on one half of the ground.
Captains and coaches hate it if their bowlers are expensive – controlling the scoreboard is a common tactic for building pressure in county cricket.
Gus Atkinson is another tall, hit-the-pitch bowler who has had a stellar start to his England career. He was bowling second-change for Surrey when he made his Test debut earlier this year and was even at risk of being dropped. Now he has 43 Test wickets at an average of 22.6, usually opening the bowling.
At one of my old teams, Middlesex, there are a couple of bowlers who I believed had the attributes for international cricket when I first saw them bowl.
Tom Helm and Blake Cullen are both tall and naturally hit the pitch back of a length. But Middlesex, in an attempt to control the scoreboard and win games, wanted something different.
They have regularly chosen Ryan Higgins, Tim Murtagh, now retired, and Ethan Bamber, who has since joined Warwickshire, ahead of the faster, hit-the-deck bowlers. They would bowl fuller, slower, at the stumps and often with the keeper standing up.
This isn’t a criticism of what these guys do, because they are incredibly skilful and their numbers are superb. They just have skills very different to what is usually required in international cricket. It is why picking a Test team on domestic records alone would be too simplistic, it requires more nuance.
