Were you doing bowling changes by number, Joe?

The editor of Cricket Statistician analyses recent events

With two more Tests to come, England suddenly look more like a rabble than like winners. It might be a cause for alarm that at the sharp end of the attack we still have Anderson and Broad, brilliant bowlers still but needing to be looked after.

We do not have a real Test match spinner (as the captain was at pains to tell us) and the rest of the seamers do not look like stepping up from occasional to regular wicket takers, though the one likely to suffer for this is Mark Wood for not blowing the South Africans away with sheer pace, something that rarely happens in Test cricket.

The long queue of young seamers behind them do not at the moment look likely to do better. Mentioned are Jake Ball and Toby Roland-Jones: I had expected by now more clamour for Ben Coad or Jamie Porter, who have been among the wickets this year, but the queue for England seam places now seems to be so long that adding more names seems futile.

Unkind selectors would probably dispose of Keaton Jennings while injury may have been a kindness to Gary Ballance. It is hard to believe that a few months ago we saw Jennings and Haseeb Hameed competing for an opening place and that several other promising contenders seem to have faded.. I suspect that someone (or two) rather older players might well be asked to step up. Mark Stoneman or Dawid Malan, perhaps, who have the added advantage of a metropolitan base?

There is much muttering about England being unable to adapt from white ball to red ball. One area of white-ball cricket they might do well to adopt is proactive and imaginative captaincy, especially with bowling changes, where Root seemed to be doing it by numbers. As in one, two quicks: two, support seamers: three, mix them up: four (if desperate), spin.

We are used to England from about the 50th over going defensive, waiting for the new ball. But in South Africa’s second innings Root, rather grudgingly, had both spinners operating together for a few overs before he could call on the new ball. Two wickets fell to the spinners, who were indeed immediately whipped off before the 80th over and the new ball.

Now there are two things to say here. Moeen Ali has excellent figures and has bowled well at times, but even after Lord’s is not seen by the England set-up as a front-line Test bowler. Liam Dawson is in the side because of some peculiar notion about all-rounders and because the alternative would have been to play a genuine – if somewhat intermittent – international class spinner in Adil Rashid. England selectors and captains – whoever they are – do not play wrist spinners if they can help it, and given what he has, Root does not bowl spinners very much.

Keshav Maharaj, trusted by his captain, took six wickets. Nobody has told Maharaj he isn’t a Test spinner. A piece of advice for Derbyshire’s Hamidullah Qadri – don’t play for England, play for Afghanistan, where spin bowling is appreciated.