Learning trade at ‘Ciderabad’ is paying off for Bess and Leach
England’s victory in the opening Test in Sri Lanka was forged 5,600 miles away, at Taunton. For it was in the shadow of the Quantocks that Dom Bess and Jack Leach were given the most precious gift for an aspiring English spin bowler: enough overs to bowl.
It is no coincidence that Bess and Leach, who shared 14 wickets in Galle, are products of Somerset. No home ground has been anything like as conducive to spin in recent years as Taunton. Since 2016, 40 per cent of overs at the ground have been by spinners, comfortably the highest of any regular county
ground. While other counties have often had no need to select a specialist spinner, Somerset have normally needed two at home.
“Playing on those wickets gives you a lot more overs and lets you sort of learn the art of bowling spin and having that experience of people looking at you to bowl teams out,” Jack Leach told The Daily Telegraph before taking his Test tally in Sri Lanka to 24 wickets in four Tests.
“There were probably still times where I didn’t do it and it’s as much about those experiences as it is about the ones where you managed to do it. I think you learn a lot from mistakes you make.”
The success that Bess, who has now moved to Yorkshire, and Leach enjoyed in Galle was the first time that two England spinners reared in the same county had played together in a Test since 2012, when Northamptonshire-raised pair Monty Panesar and Graeme Swann shared a brilliant alliance in India.
Northants’ home ground, Wantage Road, was frequently lambasted for offering excessive turn. In 2003 the county were handed an eight-point penalty by pitch inspectors for a “poor” pitch in a game against Worcestershire.
Such attention from the pitch inspectors has been familiar to Somerset. After years of criticism of the turn at “Ciderabad”, Somerset were handed a 12-point penalty for the pitch against Essex in 2019 because of “excessive unevenness of bounce”. “Swanny and Monty had a very similar pitch to bowl on at Northampton – you’re bowling more overs and also you’re getting more encouragement,” says Carl Crowe, the former Leicestershire off spinner who is a spin coach at Lancashire.
He believes that such wickets can accelerate spinners’ development. “If you’re bowling on a spinning wicket and you release a ball that should spin and it does spin – you’re getting immediate feedback, the dopamine hit from seeing the ball spin. If you’re bowling on a wicket that doesn’t spin, which is most the wickets in England, no matter how many revs you impart on the ball behaves the same. So that feedback from your action is not there.”
While the turn and bite offered at Taunton have been exceptional by English standards, it has been nothing unusual by the standards of what England face when abroad.
Wickets that offer extreme turn are an education for spinners about what is required when they go to Asia – and batsmen about how to play the turning ball.
Perhaps this is the lesson from Galle 2021 and Mumbai 2012. The same county wickets that pitch inspectors have reprimanded may help the England team.