‘It is difficult to imagine Abdul Qadir being allowed to survive and flower in Yorkshire.’
Mike Brearley
IN his final radio interview before dying in 1995, England and Worcestershire’s Roly Jenkins recited the famous words of Lord Harris, who dominated the game’s administration in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, ‘Cricket. It is a moral lesson in itself, and the classroom is God’s air and sunshine. Foster it, my brothers.
‘Protect it from anything that will sully it, so that it will be in favour with all men.’
‘What would he do in his grave,’ Jenkins asked, ‘if he could see what was going on today?’
But even in this barren land for leggies there are some reasons to be cheerful. During the 2013/14 Ashes series the selectors did something brave. They picked a specialist leg-spinner in a match against Australia for the first time since the 1960s.
In all that time, when England had struggled against Shane Warne, Stuart MacGill and others, Australia’s batsmen, among them Allan Border, Steve Waugh, Greg Chappell, Ricky Ponting and Mark Taylor, had never faced the same challenge. While Warne took 195 wickets against England, not one proper bowler even tried to do so against Australia.
The leg-spinner England chose to make at least a partial correction to this imbalance was Scott Borthwick, a blond-haired 23-year-old from Durham. With England already 4-0 down in the five-Test series, he got the call-up. There was nothing to lose.
Borthwick came into the attack at Sydney, known as a spinners’ ground, with two of Australia’s best batsmen, Steve Smith and Brad Haddin, already settled. His collar turned up, he rubbed his right hand in the dirt, twirled the ball a few times from right hand to left and prepared to bowl. Haddin, in the pre-match banter, had promised the team would attack Borthwick, targeting him as the Australians do any perceived weakness.
Shane Warne watched from the commentary box, tempering leg spin-lovers’ hopes with the caveat that one cannot expect accuracy from an inexperienced player.
Borthwick bowled his first ball without disaster. A few more followed and he appeared to become more confident. The legacy of Terry Jenner’s coaching was evident in a strong body action and a willingness to toss the ball up. It was beginning to look okay.
Another caveat came from David Gower. ‘The trouble for any leg-spinner, now and for the next 100 years,’ he said, ‘is that they will always be compared to the best. That’s Shane Warne.’ Gower was over-estimating the historical awareness of the average cricket fan. After all, who talks of S.F. Barnes in that way now, just over 100 years after he left Test cricket? But we got his point.
Nasser Hussain chipped in to remind Sky Sports viewers that, since 1970, English leg-spinners had taken 24 Test wickets at 93, while Australia’s had taken 1,229 at 30.
Borthwick, a jolly soul, kept going. Then, with the third ball of his fifth over, he did it. He got a wicket. Left-hander Mitchell Johnson slogged the ball to long-on where substitute fielder Joe Root held a high catch. According to my research this was the first Ashes wicket for an English leg-spinner since Bob Barber had Graham McKenzie caught by John Snow for a duck at Old Trafford in 1968.
Borthwick was obviously a raw talent. He bowled several full tosses but managed to beat the bat when he pitched the ball correctly. In the second innings he took three wickets: opener Chris Rogers, tail-ender Ryan Harris and Haddin, the man who had promised the punishment.
His figures for the match were 4-82 off just 13 overs. It was not containing or accurate, but it got people out. In a match at the end of a long-lost series, Borthwick’s was a good selection. If he could return to Durham and get some overs ‘under his belt’ he looked a real prospect. As the 2014 season began, he saw clearly his role and need to develop. ‘In four-day cricket leg-spinners are still wicket-takers, but you try and build pressure by bowling long spells for not many runs and tie an end up, sending down five or six maidens and then get the batsman out.’
He also realised the difficulties he might face. ‘I think any spinner has to accept being hit for sixes because you’re inevitably going to bowl the odd bad ball. The great man Shane Warne bowled a few bad balls and he was the best leg-spinner in the word, so you’ve got to stay calm, bounce back and think positively.’
So how did the 2014 season go? Borthwick did very well, but not as a leg-spinner. With his all-round talent he played as Durham’s number three batsman, amassing 1,187 runs at 43.96. The seamer-friendly pitches at Chester-le-Street meant others did most of the bowling. Borthwick managed just 183.2 overs in the season. He took 13 wickets at 58.61.
England did not come calling again, preferring the burgeoning part-time off spin of Moeen Ali as they lost to Sri Lanka and beat India. It was disappointing for Borthwick, but hopefully his positive attitude will mean he can once again come into consideration as much for his bowling as his batting. ‘He needs to get plenty of overs in,’ argues Ian Salisbury. ‘Otherwise there’s no way he can progress to being the bowler he can and should be.’
Elsewhere, Sussex leg-spinner Will Beer managed one first-class match in 2014, taking 0-76, being used mainly as a one-day bowler. Max Waller of Somerset did not play a County Championship match.
A sadder fate awaited Tom Craddock, who was laid off by Essex after England left-arm spinner Monty Panesar was brought in from Sussex following his sacking for urinating on a nightclub bouncer on Brighton seafront. Craddock departed the first-class game with a bowling average of 30.51. He was 25 years old, almost a decade younger than Australia’s Clarrie Grimmett had been when he made his Test debut.
Craddock made headlines in 2013, taking five wickets for Essex against England at Chelmsford in a special pre-Ashes warm-up. His victims were Kevin Pietersen, Ian Bell, Matt Prior, Graeme Swann and Steven Finn. ‘An unbelievable achievement,’ he declared at the time. ‘I’m chuffed to bits with it.’ Asked, inevitably, if he would be the next Shane Warne, he smiled and replied, ‘We’ll see about that one. I’ll just take it one step at a time. I’ll just keep trying to take wickets and see where we go from there.’
Robin Hobbs, who made his way with Essex half a century before, is unhappy at the signing of Panesar. ‘Craddock bowled bloody well against England,’ he says. ‘He was going to play the last seven county games of the season and his mother got terminally ill. He had to go back to Yorkshire, where he’s from. That’s why we’ve now signed Panesar, much to everybody’s absolute disgust. Where does that put Craddock? He’s now just going to drift out of the game.’
To cap Craddock’s disappointment, the warm-up match against England does not even have first-class status in the records. It lost this after two Essex players were injured and had to be replaced.
One leg-spinner who does appear to be on the rise again is Yorkshire’s Adil Rashid. Hobbs has always rated the Bradford-born all-rounder, who played five one-dayers and five T20 matches for England in 2009 and 2010. ‘I admire Rashid,’ he says. ‘I think he’s a bloody good cricketer. I think England should look at him again. His leg-break bowling went down the hill a little bit but it’s improved again. I’m not sure England would go back to him. If you don’t fit into a category and tick all the boxes, your card’s marked, I’m sure.’
Rashid, who began bowling leg spin at the age of nine, has an unorthodox action. He is more open-chested than prescribed under the Terry Jenner system. In fact Salisbury thinks he was left ‘confused’ by his time in Adelaide under Jenner’s tutelage and that his natural talent needs to be left to flourish.
In 2009 Graeme Swann predicted great things for him, albeit demonstrating a lack of historical knowledge of leg spin. ‘Adil is a long way down the line with leg spin at 20,’ he said. ‘He is probably better than anyone there has ever been bar one Australian fella. But he will admit he is nowhere near the finished article – he needs to develop, learn, and play more cricket basically. It is exciting for England just how good he is at 20. He could be exceptional at 25 and a world-beater by 30. Hopefully he will be.’
But his Yorkshire captain at the time, Anthony McGrath, sounded a note of caution when he was picked to tour with England in the West Indies. ‘We have got to learn from what has gone before with the likes of Chris Schofield, who played a couple of matches and that was it. I am not saying that Adil can’t perform now at that level but, as a young player, you will get dips in form.
‘As a club, and as a national team with all their people around, we have all got to support him in those low times to make sure that he is sustainable in the next ten to 15 years.’
The number of revolutions per minute achieved by England’s spinners was measured in 2010 using TrackMan, a device adapted from golf, which involved placing a small camera behind the bowler’s arm. Rashid topped the list with 2,312. Unfortunately he did not have a good time on the South Africa tour of 2009/10. When he returned to England, it was said he had been told to speed up his action. His figures declined.
Mark Lawson, by then laid off by Yorkshire, was moved to tell the Daily Express that Rashid was being under-used by the county. ‘The main problem is nothing to do with pitches or conditions; it’s that we still have a want for immediate success,’ he said. ‘As a leg-spin bowler even up to the age of 28 or 29 you’re still going to have good years and bad years… I spent two seasons as a 12th man, not playing cricket. The most important thing for any leg-spinner is to bowl a lot of overs but you need support.’
By the beginning of 2013 Rashid was beginning to feel frustrated at Yorkshire. His career was not progressing as he wanted, let alone as Swann had predicted. He was strongly critical of captain Andrew Gale when he spoke to the Independent. ‘I’ve been playing here seven years and I want to stay,’ he said. ‘But I have a career and I can’t waste another year.’ Rashid complained that he had not had adequate backing. ‘If I don’t feel as though I’ve been treated well, I’ll go,’ he added. ‘It’s hard to come straight on and hit your length and line with every delivery if you’re hardly bowling and the coaches and people around you don’t give you the backing.’ Rashid argued Gale was only giving him brief spells.
He appeared to be fulfilling the prediction made by former England captain Mike Brearley in 1985, three years before Rashid was born. ‘Leg spin, with its flourish and strut, its long-hops and its patches of brilliance, is anathema to the Yorkshire mentality. It is difficult to imagine Abdul Qadir being allowed to survive and flower in Yorkshire; and if the next small, flexible-jointed Qadir happens to be born in Bradford, his best chance would be to move south (if not also east) at an early age.’
But Rashid made his peace with Gale and Yorkshire. He had a mediocre 2013, but the next season once again demonstrated his talent. In a Yorkshire side that stormed to the County Championship with a dominance not seen since the 1960s, he took 49 wickets at 24.81. He also scored 577 runs at 36.06. He was an all-round prospect once more, not a talented county player who had fizzled out early. He was still, after all, only 26. Rashid was picked for the short England tour to the West Indies. The chance of a leg-spinner taking part in the 2015 Ashes was not yet dead.
As for the longer term, the England and Wales Cricket Board continues its search for high-quality slow bowlers. It is no longer relying on foreign expertise like that Terry Jenner once provided. In 2012 it appointed former England off-spinner Peter Such as national head spin-bowling coach. The role includes developing skills at county level. He oversees a programme placing a specialist spin-bowling coach with every county and first-class university side.
Such has worked with Borthwick and Simon Kerrigan, the Lancashire left-armer who had a difficult debut in the final match of the 2013 Ashes, when he had trouble finding his length and was smashed about. He predicted both would add to their single cap:
It’s tough stepping into Test cricket, but as long as people learn from the experience it can only be a good thing.
There are some quality spin bowlers in the pipeline. It is a matter of whether we can get them through into first-team cricket and then onwards.
The game is different from years ago when you would have two spin bowlers in any team, usually an experienced one and a younger one learning the trade. That was a great learning environment and more overs of spin were bowled.
Now spin bowlers tend to be lone practitioners and, as a consequence, less spin bowling is being seen at senior level.
Swann, the off-spinner who took more than 200 Test wickets before retiring midway through the 2013/14 Ashes, has done some mentoring work. He and Such may not have bowled leg spin but they understand what it takes to prosper as a slow bowler at the highest level. The few leg-spinners in the English first-class game and their would-be successors need all the assistance they can get.
The recent age of truly sensational Test match spinners – Shane Warne, Muttiah Muralitharan and Anil Kumble at the peak – has ended. Yet that is not to say we live in unexciting times. As well as traditional styles, there has been a growth in the number of ‘mystery’ bowlers on the international scene. Ajantha Mendis of Sri Lanka and Sunil Narine of the West Indies are among those flummoxing batsmen with their oddities. The carrom ball, flicked between the thumb and a bent middle finger, is becoming more prevalent. The doosra is still in use, although, as in the case of Pakistan’s Saeed Ajmal, it can cause problems to an off-spinner’s action, potentially rendering it illegal with a requirement to bend the arm too far.
And, it appears, there is scope for an almost googly-like degree of innovation among traditional leg-spinners, without the need for any semblance of illegality. Sports scientists Aaron Beach, René Ferdinands and Peter Sinclair of Sydney University have seemingly discovered a new way to exploit the Magnus effect, the sideways movement through the air created by the disruption of air flow caused by a spinning ball. Remember, the Magnus effect is what allowed the ‘Barnes ball’ of the early 20th century and ‘that ball’ bowled by Warne at Old Trafford in 1993 to happen.
Beach, Ferdinands and Sinclair looked at the movement through the air of different types of spinners. They found that, although leg-spinners have historically been thought to have the ability to swerve the ball in to the right-handed batsman before pitching, two of those they studied had managed the opposite – that is, swerve away – with ostensibly the same action. ‘This ability may be the exclusive domain of leg-spinners alone,’ they said. ‘It may even be feasible to train leg-spin bowlers to spin balls in the same direction… giving them the ability to swerve a ball to the left and right, even though it has the same direction of spin.’
Without any discernible variation, the ball could swerve in or out before hitting the pitch and turning away. It would take some batsman to deal with that. How one can teach this level of controllable subtlety is baffling, but someone might do it.
Before Bosanquet came along, mainstream cricketing opinion had not conceptualised the googly. A fast leg break was mere fantasy before Barnes. If anyone achieves what Beach, Ferdinands and Sinclair suggest, it will make the technical requirements of top-class leg spin even harder and the rewards potentially larger. That is what sporting evolution is all about.
We led the world at the start of the last century but lost touch with our own genius. If English cricket can get the basics back in place and start fostering a new generation of first-class and then Test leg-spinners, who knows what might happen?