BEAUTIFULLY though he bowled to take career-best figures in New Zealand’s first innings, you get the feeling that James Anderson will always be susceptible to the question: “Which James Anderson is going to pitch up today?”

These tags tend to stay with you throughout your career and all you can do as player is shrug it all off and get on with the job. I managed to sustain a 15-year career despite the words “casual” and “laid-back” being applied to most things I did and, though it does get frustrating to endure such constant repetition, at the end of it all one just looks back on the results with suitable satisfaction. If Jimmy keeps picking up wickets as he has in this Test, the nickname “Daisy”, as in “some days he does and some days he doesn’t” will not trouble him.

In a way, events of the past year or so sum up the dilemma for Anderson himself and the selectors. At the end of last summer he found himself leading the attack against India and it seemed that the role was one he enjoyed. There were signs then that he had found some maturity and with it greater consistency. Then came the winter and Kandy and another pasting from Sanath Jayasuriya, followed by the hand on the shoulder and the word from the coach that he could put his feet up for the rest of that series.

Come the new year it took the falls from grace of Matthew Hoggard and Steve Harmison in Hamilton to open the door again and Anderson was back in and firing New Zealand to defeat in Wellington. He is in occupation now and that is how it will stay for a while now, though the selectors’ next ticklish decision will come when Andrew Flintoff is declared fit again and is available to take his place in what I assume will remain a four-man attack. If he were to slot in as an allrounder, then on recent evidence of his form with the bat England would be a batsman short. But there again, that is how they have been operating anyway on any given day all summer.

As the incumbent with wickets under his belt, the trick for Anderson is to banish any thoughts on the topic from his mind. All his focus has to be on how to improve in the column on his assessment form headed “Consistency”. Even yesterday we saw why, as his opening overs on the resumption were wildly astray and the man with the most to cope with was not a New Zealand batsman, but Tim Ambrose behind the stumps. That was largely because the ball was swinging beyond his control, but previously in his career he has bowled his worst when the ball stopped swinging entirely and he was unable to maintain enough control of his line, conceding boundaries all too often in the process.

The feeling is that he has rediscovered what naturally made him a good bowler in the first place. If you remember him in 2003 at the World Cup in Cape Town, he swung the ball at good pace in the evening atmosphere and demolished Pakistan’s top order. A star was born, it seemed. He had pace and movement, so what could possible go wrong?

The answer to that is that England’s coaching staff decided to remodel his action. He might be Troy Cooley’s only failure, the former England bowling coach being widely revered for his work in that department. The likes of Harmison and Hoggard - yes, the ones now ironically out of the team - swore blind that Cooley was god and there is little doubt that Cooley was mighty good with the bowlers as a whole.

However, with Anderson it was felt that he needed to change his natural action to protect him from injury and unfortunately for Jimmy, he lost some of that natural pace and movement - and got injured anyway. Then England felt that they needed to keep him in and around the squad and he carried a lot of drinks trays, but played no cricket for either country or county. It was a time when he needed to be out there on the park learning or relearning his trade, hence it took a while before he began to get some overs under his belt. When he did, the wickets came for Lancashire and he was back in business.

It was interesting that his favourite from those seven first-innings scalps was Jacob Oram’s. It would have been easy to pick either of those balls that got Aaron Redmond and Brendon McCullum, both peaches that had the batsmen groping in thin air. The deliberate ploy to go around the wicket and produce an away-swinger to the left-hander was conceived and executed beautifully. It had echoes of the way he had set up Sourav Ganguly at Lord’s last year.

It is important that England have someone with the knack of dismissing left-handers, so it will be a handy trick for him to master. Hoggard was one with that knack but he, of course, is now out of favour.

South Africa, with Graeme Smith at the forefront, come next and next year England have to cope with Australia’s left-handers again too. Last time round it was Flintoff who worked over Simon Katich and Adam Gilchrist in particular with the same method as used by Anderson on Oram.

One obviously hopes that Flintoff will be available to do the same again, but he will need support and if he isn’t there for any reason, someone else, maybe Anderson, will have to assume that role.