Why England’s cricket team can’t play good quality spin-bowling

If you are seeking reasons for England’s collapses against two good Indian spinners on wickets that gave them, admittedly, a good deal of assistance, you might start by taking a look at the 2020 Wisden, pages 1238-9. There you will find a list of the leading bowlers in an English summer, from 1946 to 2019. There are actually two columns, one giving you the leading wicket taker, the other the bowler who finished top of the averages. The first is the more relevant.

From 1946 to 1958, the leading wicket-taker was always a spinner: orthodox slow left arm, off-spinner, wrist-spinner: Eric Hollies, Tom Goddard, Jack Walsh, Roly Jenkins, Roy Tattersall, Bob Appleyard, Johnny Wardle, Bruce Dooland (twice), Tony Lock (thrice), Don Shepherd. Nine counties were represented: Warwickshire, Gloucestershire, Leicestershire, Worcestershire, Lancashire, Yorkshire, Nottinghamshire, Surrey, Glamorgan. Jim Laker, one of the greatest of all off spinners, never topped this table. There were many other good spinners: Doug Wright from Kent, Malcolm Hilton, Bob Berry, Tommy Greenhough (all Lancashire), Jack Young (Middlesex), Sam Cook (Gloucester), Eric Bedser (Surrey) and George Tribe, another Australian at Northants. And, from the mid-Fifties, Ray Illingworth, Fred Titmus and David Allen, all of whom would take more than a hundred Test wickets, bowling off-spin. So, it was a rare county match in which a batsman wasn’t faced with high-quality spin.Things are very different today.

Until 1968, county cricket was played on uncovered wickets. A rain-affected pitch drying under a hot sun might be as nasty and unpredictable as the pitches in India these last weeks. Batsmen had to develop a method to deal with the conditions. Some succeeded – Len Hutton and Tom Graveney, for example. I think they would have found a way of coping with Ashwin and Patel, but it required experience of such wickets to learn how to play on them. English batsmen today have no such experience. Many have precious little experience of playing spin even on good batting pitches. No wonder many looked like novices in Chennai and Ahmedabad; novices in such conditions is precisely what they were.

Test cricketers, with their central contracts, now play almost no county cricket. But it is still in the County Championship that future Test players are formed. It is there that they learn, or should learn, how to adapt to different circumstances and conditions. Yet the odds are against them receiving such an education. They certainly won’t have much chance of learning how to play high quality spin. The first season for ten or so years in which a slow bowler, Essex’s South African off-spinner Simon Harmer, was the leading wicket-taker in first-class cricket was 2019.

Counties rarely used to take the field without two spinners, now they will often have only a single occasional one; and he probably won’t get on to bowl much in the first innings of a match. Sometimes, admittedly, a county will recruit an overseas Test player for a few games. In 2019, Yorkshire fielded the South African slow left-armer Keshav Maharaj in five matches; he took 38 wickets at an average just under 19, some doubtless against batsmen unaccustomed to facing high-quality slow bowling. Yet at the same time promising young slow bowlers in the Yorkshire squad have failed to develop, partly because they have had so few opportunities to do so.

Significantly, ten of Maharaj’s wickets were taken against Somerset at Taunton. I say “significantly” because Taunton is one of the few county grounds where conditions usually favour spin. Not surprisingly, England’s two main spinners in Sri Lanka and India these last weeks were from Somerset: Jack Leach and Dom Bess, though Bess, still very inexperienced for a Test player is moving to Yorkshire.

But what is Somerset’s reward? They have been penalised for producing “unsuitable” wickets. “Unsuitable” means they favour spin. Counties are almost never penalised for producing green wickets that favour seam-up or indeed for ones that are so flat as to offer nothing to any bowler. But produce a pitch that takes spin, and you’re in trouble. This is crazy and it’s not how it used to be. When Surrey reigned supreme in the 1950s everyone knew that The Oval wicket was prepared for Laker and Lock. Unfair? Perhaps. A school for promising young batsmen? Certainly. The best English player of spin in the second half of the twentieth century was probably Ken Barrington, reared on that often-venomous Oval wicket. In dreamy imagination I can visualise Barrington coping with Ashwin and Patel on that Ahmedabad raging turner.

The people to blame for the humiliation England endured in India aren’t the players or the coaching staff, but the England and Wales Cricket Board (ECB). Over the years, the ECB systematically downgraded the County Championship, confining it mostly to the early and last weeks of the summer – beginning it indeed before the swallows arrive and prolonging it until they are preparing to depart. Only a handful of matches take place in the height of summer – fewer doubtless now that we have this absurd money-making Hundred. Meanwhile, the calendar is so arranged that Test match players, unless not required for white-ball cricket, are almost never available for the County Championship. And then we send very talented youngsters like Ollie Pope, Dom Sibley and Dan Lawrence to play Test cricket in India and Sri Lanka against good quality spin bowling such as they have seldom faced in their brief careers.

Their counterparts a long time ago would have faced Test match fast bowlers and Test match spinners almost every week of an English summer, from May till early September. Likewise, bowlers such as Leach and Bess would have had to learn their craft as the likes of Laker, Lock and Wardle did, bowling against batsmen who were accomplished players of spin. Setting players a stiff exam is the way to develop them, but it’s tough to face them with an exam for which their inadequate experience has left them wholly unprepared.

Of course, England have lost Tests and series to high-quality spin in the past, but rarely so feebly. Centuries were made against Shane Warne and Muralitharan. Time now for England to get, as that devoted Surrey supporter Sir John Major might say, “back to basics”. To do that requires the revitalisation of the County Championship. “Some hope,” you say sceptically. I wish could disagree.