Rashid must deliver on a perfect pitch
This is Adil Rashid’s time, this is his moment. he has been around a while now and is a key figure this winter, especially against india’s array of right handers in the series to come. so, England will want more from him than we saw yesterday.
Rashid might be a relative novice in the Test arena but he has considerable experience in county cricket and there is no disputing his worth to England in the one-day game where he was their most successful bowler last summer. But in 50 and 20- over cricket he has a safety blanket, with men out on the boundary, and he gets away with the odd long hop and full toss because he picks up wickets when the batsmen are going after him.
Alastair Cook has not really known which way to go with Rashid in Tests so far, as was shown with a delivery just after lunch yesterday when Tamim iqbal gloved it to where leg- slip should have been on a turning pitch.
instead Cook had four men on the boundary to limit the damage from the bad balls and Rashid still ended up going for the best part of four runs an over.
The reason Gareth Batty is there is that the England captain was not entirely convinced by the combination of Rashid and Moeen Ali on turning surfaces against Pakistan in the UAE last winter. Cook wanted a steady option.
Not that Moeen under-performed yesterday. he bowled the right pace for Chittagong, around 56mph, and his over before lunch when he took two wickets was absolutely perfect.
At that pace the margin for error is greater and the batsmen find it more difficult to play off the back foot against the dip and bounce Moeen was generating. Rashid struggles to bowl it that quickly.
his stock ball is more around 50mph and it is when he tries to bowl quicker that the poor deliveries kick in. he is not comfortable making the Talking point: Rashid (left) and Moeen in discussion GETTY IMAGES adjustment. so my advice would be to strike a balance between trying to improve but also sticking at what he is good at and the ball that got Mahmudullah was a nicely flighted leg- spinner, around 50mph, that got the batsman coming forward. The good news is that Moeen looks much more comfortable in the role he has now, that of top- order batsman first and foremost and then as a spinner. it is the role he has always filled in county cricket and it is the one that suits him best. You can tell from his body language and the way he is going about his business that he is enjoying himself and he will have a completely different mind-set now to when he was England’s frontline spinner. That role, which he has been forced to perform for the bulk of the last two years, has weighed heavily on Moeen and has been unfair on him but it is to his great credit that he has simply got on with it and done his job as best he can. Cook handled Moeen well yesterday and soon realised his stock pace was better suited to this pitch than Rashid’s but he may have held his seamers back a little, until they started reversing it under lights. A captain must not forget his seamers out here because reverse swing could play a massive role in both Bangladesh and india and i would start with one quicker bowler on the third morning. But it is the spinners who will be to the fore and that is why Rashid has to rise to the challenge. Any spinner should know how to bowl on this pitch. it’s a surface a slow bowler can only dream about. he, and the others, must relish it, make the most of it and find a way to take wickets.