Leach’s plea for variety
ENGLAND spinner Jack Leach believes county cricket must offer a greater variety of pitches if it is to breed players capable of succeeding all over the world.
Resounding defeats in the first two Tests in the West Indies have raised renewed questions about England’s red-ball team, and specifically their ability to thrive in foreign conditions.
Those concerns were temporarily shelved earlier this winter following a 3-0 series victory in Sri Lanka – with Leach’s left-arm spin to the fore – but they are firmly back on the agenda as England prepare for the third and final Test starting in St Lucia on Saturday.
The ECB want to see an end to the obsession with seam-friendly green surfaces that allow bowlers of mid-range quality to be effective in pushing for results but that do little to promote the old-fashioned disciplines of Test batting.
They are determined to change the condition of those pitches to discourage sides, worried about relegation or searching for promotion, from producing only ‘result’ surfaces. Pitches that encourage batsmen to play shots before they get a ball with their name on it will be marked more severely to remove the benefit of those results.
Leach plies his trade for Somerset on generous turning decks at Taunton and says criticism about the spin they offer – Middlesex and Lancashire have made clear their objections in recent seasons – is indicative of a wider problem.
England coach Trevor Bayliss and captain Joe Root were careful to avoid using the variable bounce at the Sir Vivian Richards’ Stadium as an excuse for last week’s 10-wicket defeat, but both made plain their dissatisfaction at the surface.
But Leach, who is yet to feature in this series, said: “We need to challenge people to be better at cricket rather than complain about pitches.
“The surface at Antigua, we’d have not come up against in county championship. We need players to experience different surfaces. It’s important to change attitudes. That would strengthen our international teams in years to come.”
England’s batsmen have been pilloried for lacking patience in the Caribbean, their counterattacking style coming off badly in comparison to the studied diligence of Kraigg Brathwaite and Darren Bravo.
England have passed 400 only once in 28 innings since the start of 2018, when Alastair Cook and Root both scored hundreds against India at the Oval. And in only a quarter of those innings have England managed to bat for more than
100 overs .
Leach hinted that could also be an ingrained quality, with the prevalence of seam-friendly, green pitches in the domestic game making crease occupation a rare skill.
“There’s very few times where you spend 150 overs in the field and it’s a batting paradise,” he said.
“So as much as spinning pitches are important, playing on flat ones is too. You can’t do things you haven’t practised before.”