Spinners offer far more than just giving the quickies a rest
The editor of Cricket Statistician analyses recent events
Mutterings, at last, about the tedious sameness of the England attack. Four rightarm medium-fast bowlers and Moeen Ali for when they all get tired.
History tells us a story here. Before the heavy manners of Clive Lloyd’s West Indian attack, playing four quicker bowlers was unknown.
Even the convention of opening the attack with two quick bowlers was not set in stone.
The West Indies started the fashion for very practical reasons: their support slow bowlers after the retirement of Lance Gibbs were ineffective, while they could field four very effective fast bowlers at that time; Garner, Holding, Croft and Roberts. The fifth bowler could be an occasional twirler.
In February 1979, West Indies finished a tour of India at Kanpur, in a match in which India scored 644-7d. One of the bowlers was an inexperienced Malcolm Marshall, and among the others were the slow left-armer Raphick Jumadeen and the off-spinner Derick Parry, supported by Larry Gomes and Vanburn Holder.
By the autumn, they played Australia with Roberts, Holding, Croft and Garner supported by Collis King at medium pace. Mind you, it didn’t always work and in the second innings of that Test Alvin Kallicharan bowled 18 overs of off-breaks without success.
But that was a decision based on using the best bowlers available. It was not based on the belief that England appear to have that spin bowling doesn’t work, and that the role of the spinner is to give the quicker bowlers, injury-prone as they are, a rest. The selection of Mason Crane as second spinner seems even stranger as we go on, since the is obviously unsuited to the role of shutting up one end and could not be regarded as cover for Moeen Ali. So what is he there for, if England will never play two spinners?
To find a successful England spin attack (though Graeme Swann held an end on his own, plus perhaps Phil Edmonds, Peter Such and Phil Tufnell) we would have to go back to the 1950s and the days of Lock and Laker – but not forgetting the others.
England could leave both behind (as in 1954/55) and go with Wardle and Appleyard, and those were days when English fast bowlers were plentiful: Fred Trueman was left at home for that tour as well. And of course uncovered English pitches were very different then, giving spinners hundreds of overs in a season, time to practice the trade.
But one cannot be optimistic. The ECB says that county cricket is there to bring on Test players, but then shoves the four-day game off to the end of the season, so it can’t.