Ashes obsessives are wrong to think there’s nothing to learn from Test matches

Winning a Test series away from home is almost always difficult and making a 3-0 clean sweep is unusual. So, even while acknowledging that Sri Lanka is in the midst of rebuilding their team, and that their captain, Chandimal, tore a muscle in the First Test and missed the next two, this must rank as one of England’s best series for a long time.

Some – those, that is, who think nothing much matters except an Ashes series – may say that this one solved none of England’s problems, and is therefore irrelevant. Now it’s true that England won’t be fielding three spin bowlers against Australia next summer, but Test matches are played in several countries where at least some of the wickets favour spin and offer little to pace. So, unless you’re prepared to write these off, finding and fielding slow bowlers capable of winning matches is surely imperative.

Jack Leach, Moeen Ali and Adil Rashid took 48 wickets between them, Leach and Ali 18 apiece, Rashid 12. All were effective at times, Leach the best of the three at exercising control. Rashid bowled fewer overs than the other two. It seemed as if Joe Root had less confidence in him – even though they are both Yorkshiremen. Perhaps Joe has inherited some of the traditional Yorkshire distrust of wrist-spin. The county has very rarely had a front-line wrist-spinner. Johnny Wardle who, like Gary Sobers, bowled orthodox slow left-arm equally well, was rarely allowed to bowl his back-of-the-hand stuff for Yorkshire, though he won a Test series in South Africa with this style of bowling. The odd thing is that Yorkshire batsmen were thought to be poor at playing wrist-spin, even in the County’s years of dominance.

Actually, there has long been an English distrust of wrist-spin – despite the problems this bowling has usually caused English batsmen. Bob Willis, talking about Rashid on the SKY Cricket Debate programme,  trotted out the old charge that wrist-spinners are inevitably more erratic and therefore more expensive than other bowlers.  (Actually, in this series Rashid’s runs per over rate was almost identical with Moeen Ali’s.) The idea is nonsensical of course. If wrist spinners are quite often more expensive, it may be because captains – especially English ones – rarely bring them on except batsmen are well set and it’s time to try something different. In any case, there are plenty of examples of wrist-spinners from Grimmett and O’Reilly between the wars to Abdul Qadir, Mushtaq Ahmed, Shane Warne and Yasir Shah in more recent days, all capable to taking lots of wickets at an economical rate.

The only pace bowler to take more than one wicket for England in this series was Ben Stokes.  He did this by bowling in the style of New Zealand’s Neil Wagner – that’s to say, by bowling quick short-pitched balls which had no chance of hitting the wicket but might hit the batsman on the head and so persuade him to give a catch in an attempt to protect himself. The occasional bumper or bouncer is a legitimate weapon of which one wouldn’t wish to deprive a bowler, but this sort of stuff is reprehensible. Umpires have the authority to check it. They should do so.

The Ashes-obsessed fans who would say there is nothing useful to be learned from a series like this have got it right in one respect. We are no nearer to solving England’s opening-batsman problem. It’s only in Sri Lanka and Bangladesh that openers are tested by spin rather than pace.  So we don’t yet know if Rory Burns is going to be able to carry his county form to Test cricket because he was here set an almost irrelevant examination. Keaton Jennings made a very good hundred in Galle, but his problem has been against pace not spin.  We’ll learn more from the Tests against the West Indies in February. The West Indies may still be a pale shadow of their great teams in the second half of the twentieth century, but in Kemar Roach, Shane Gilbert and the captain Jason Holder they have a more than respectable pace attack. If Burns and Jennings get a few partnerships going, England will be on the way to solving their number 3 problem too – whether that spot is to be filled by Jonny Bairstow as seems likely and sensible, or by someone else . Your first wicket-down batsman is surely entitled to expect that sometimes at least he will come to the wicket with the score at 80 for 1 and the ball no longer swinging.

The fields set by both captains were a  strange feature of this series  – perplexing indeed to older watchers. If it wasn’t that the players were wearing whites, you might have been watching the middle overs of a 50-over ODI.  Boundaries were protected and consequently, three or four singles might be comfortably taken every over. Far more sixes are hit nowadays – -partly because of advanced bat-technology, partly because boundaries are usually shorter than they were half a century ago – but the faster rate of scoring in Test cricket also owes much to the fashion for this ODI-style field. It’s not difficult to be scoring an average of three and a half to four runs an over if you are presented with three or four easy singles. Batsmen like Joe Root and Jos Buttler can cruise along at almost a run a ball when the field is spread in this way, and they can score fast without taking any risk at all.

What has happened to the idea of containment? When the wicket favoured the batsmen, Richie Benaud, among the most astute of captains as well as a great wrist-spinner, would have a ring- field, with only one close catcher (at slip) and everyone else saving one. The challenge to the batsman was clear: if you want to score, you’re going to have to take a risk.  Perhaps with today’s bats which enable miss-hits to go to the boundary, the risk is reduced. It would still be there, however.  As for “protecting” your spinner by always having a man on the boundary square on both the off-and leg-side – to “give him confidence” apparently – the old dictum comes to mind: “you can’t set a field for bad bowling”. Especially in a  Test match a captain is surely entitled to expect his bowlers to put the ball in the right spot. No doubt the great Wilfred Rhodes was exaggerating when after more than thirty years of first-class cricket, he told Neville Cardus “ I was never cut and I was never pulled” – but I bet it didn’t happen often.