Kuldeep stumps England with wicked new spin on age-old art
Left-arm wrist-spin is an unknown quantity for batsmen in this country, writes Scyld Berry
It is the rarest form of bowling a cricket ball. No England bowler has done it for more than half a century. No Indian spinner had ever done it before Kuldeep Yadav treated England’s stumps as if they were tenpins. But England’s batsmen had better get used to left-arm wristspin swiftly, because they are likely to face it in their next eight Tests – five against India if Kuldeep is promoted to be their second spinner, then three against Sri Lanka, who are skittling South Africa with a practitioner of their own, Lakshan Sandakan.
And while England bring out their Merlyn spin-bowling machine to try to replicate Kuldeep’s delivery and microscopic variations, the very name for his stock ball is the subject of debate. According to cricket’s most definitive encyclopedia, Barclays World of Cricket, “the ball bowled by left-arm wrist-spinners which turns in from the off ” is called “the chinaman”.
The origin of the term is certain enough: in the England v West Indies Test of 1933 at Old Trafford, England’s right-handed batsman Walter Robins was beaten and stumped off the bowling of Ellis Achong, a left-arm spinner of Chinese ancestry from Trinidad. An amateur, who could afford to be forthright, Robins unleashed invective deploring his dismissal by someone of this racial origin.
Achong was probably slower than Kuldeep through the air: his team-mate Learie, later Lord, Constantine wrote that Achong’s “slows could tempt an angel out of heaven”. Achong took only eight Test wickets, but plenty more as a Lancashire League pro. I never met him, but I met his daughter, who took pride rather than umbrage at a type of delivery being named after her father’s ancestry.
Yorkshiremen take no umbrage at the very full-length ball being named after them. Bernard Bosanquet’s descendants have not called for the googly only to be called a googly, or a wrong ’un, never a Bosie. But if numbers of Yorkshiremen objected to a type of delivery being called a yorker, we would change, and so be it with the chinaman, as some voices are being raised against it.
To increase the mystique, the definition has changed. Robins was stumped off a ball that turned away from him, like Joe Root and Jonny Bairstow were the first time they faced Kuldeep in the T20 international at Old Trafford.
But, in England though not Australia, the term chinaman was then applied to its opposite, i.e., the ball turning into the right-hander.
Achong, however, was not the first left-arm wrist-spinner. The claim in Cricketers of Wombwell that Roy Kilner was the originator has not been reasonably refuted. Before the First World War, in his family’s garden in Wombwell, Kilner experimented with all sorts of spin before settling on left-arm orthodox for Yorkshire and England; and even though he rarely, if at all, bowled it at the highest level, he taught it to his team-mate, Maurice Leyland, who took more than 400 first-class wickets between the world wars.
One of cricket’s wonderful features is how it evolves in some ways, while other skills become extinct. England used to have the odd batsman who bowled left-arm wrist-spin: Leyland, Denis Compton and Donald Carr took a thousand first-class wickets between them before 1960. But then the administrators discouraged all types of spin bowling, culminating in pitch inspectors penalising any county for a pitch that turned. Hence, the current generation of England batsmen have few clues about playing wrist-spin, other than to sweep and reverse-sweep.
Before it became extinct, England produced by far their
finest left-arm wrist-spinner. When playing for Yorkshire, Johnny Wardle was an orthodox left-arm spinner, nothing fancy, and again when Len Hutton was winning the Ashes in 1954-55. But when England had them in the bag, Wardle was allowed to bowl wrist-spin in the Sydney Test, and again when he toured South Africa under Peter May in 1956-7.
By my reckoning, Wardle took 34 Test wickets at only 14 each with wrist-spin, and would have taken more on the 1958-59 tour of Australia if he had not been banned, effectively for life, for writing an article for the Daily Mail criticising his Yorkshire captain.
Most left-arm wrist-spinners have come from Trinidad, where most pitches are matting, and Australia, where most pitches are unsympathetic to orthodox spin.
The two most successful exponents were Australians who plied their trade in county cricket in the 1950s, George Tribe, for Northamptonshire, and Jack Walsh, for Leicestershire. Ray Julian kept wicket to Walsh when he made his first-class debut, aged 16. “I had no idea which way it was turning, I was diving everywhere,” Julian recalled yesterday. “I would say Walsh was better than Tribe because he had two sorts of googly” – though Tribe took 1,378 first-class wickets at 20 each to Walsh’s 1,190 at 24, in the 1950s.
And now we reap what our administrators have sowed.