Steve Harmison – who was one-fifth of a very effective England bowling attack – recently told Sky Sports that picking a bowling attack is “not about names, it’s about components.”

If you’ve followed England’s efforts away from home in recent years, this is a very simple concept to understand.

England have an orderly queue of seam bowlers keen to use the new ball, but once that Kookaburra’s got a couple of grey feathers, no-one wants to know. They just don’t quite have the right components.

He’s not tall either. I couldn’t find his exact height, but New Zealand coach Mike Hesson once described him as “5ft9 or whatever.” I think even if we allow Hesson a bit of margin for error, we can be confident we’re not in Mohammad Irfan territory here.

Wagner makes up for these apparent shortcomings with awkward angles, relentless accuracy and a frankly inexplicable level of conviction. He has taken 149 Test wickets at 28.26. That is handy.

The problem for England is to some extent Stuart Broad, who encourages the notion that the team already has tall a bouncy bowler while simultaneously being nothing of the sort.

I thought long and hard about what mystery man from county cricket might fit the bill. After mentally scouring the land for Wagner-shaped purveyors of bumpers, I realised that I was making this altogether too complicated.

CricViz charted the average length and bounce of seamers to have played 20 Tests since 2010 to show how Morkel has been the bounciest bowler in world cricket. The second-bounciest bowler on that graph is Steven Finn.