South Africa still a wrist-spinner short of a great team

South Africa need to sort a few things out before they take on Australia. This, I hasten to point out, is Shaun Pollock's view, although I'm inclined to agree with him.

It's difficult to be critical of a team that has just won a two-Test series by one match to nothing and in doing so scarcely had a moment's alarm. It would have been interesting to see what might have happened in Bulawayo had a day not been lost to rain. The pitch did enough on the last afternoon after four days' wear to suggest that it might have turned square had the game gone its full five days.

Certainly, Claude Henderson seemed to be reveling in the conditions after spending most of the series containing rather than attacking. In the event, he didn't have enough time to bowl Zimbabwe out in their second innings and perhaps, as importantly, South Africa didn't really have someone at the other end to complement him.

Lance Klusener's slow-medium off-cutters were tidy enough - and it is to Klusener's credit that he has developed this additional string to his bow, even if he's still probably a better bowler when he runs in. But the point is that there's a world of difference between spin and cut and in the end South Africa's lack of a second spinner was underlined when Pollock turned to Gary Kirsten's straight-breaks. This was a gesture as much as anything else, by then it was too late for even a specialist spinner the make a difference.

But as South Africa crowded fielders in around the bat it was difficult not wonder what a genuine wrist-spinner might have achieved. And this, perhaps, as Pollock and company look past India, who arrive here next week, to Australia later in the year, is where South Africa might be found wanting.

The fact is that neither does South Africa have wrist spinners falling out of trees nor does have a culture designed to nurture them. But what, you might ask, about Justin Ontong and Gulam Bodi. Ontong has played in the South African one-day team and only a broken finger prevented Bodi going to the West Indies this year.

This is true enough, but only up to a point. Both are batsmen who bowl, rather than wrist spinners who bat a bit. Indeed, Ontong is a bit of a mixture who can bowl both leg-breaks and off-breaks and, apparently, he has decided to concentrate on off-spin. Perhaps a word was slipped into his ear that it might be the more sensible option to choose. Who knows?

And neither is Paul Adams a genuine wrist-spinner. In his own way he is as unorthodox and unique a bowler as the Australian Johnny Gleeson, but it has been his inability to master the Chinaman, the left-arm wrist spinner's stock ball, that has stalled his career.

The fact is that not since the 1980s when Larry Hobson played for Eastern Province and Richard McGlashan for Natal have wrist-spinners played a meaningful role in South African provincial cricket. Even then Hobson could never be entirely sure of his place in the team while McGlashan's most rewarding times came under the captaincy of an Australian, Kim Hughes.

Unlike Australia, where a clear line can be drawn back from Shane Warne through Richie Benaud to Bill O'Reilly and Clarrie Grimmett, we do not have a culture that encourages leg spin and neither has there been any real effort to cultivate one.

It is a mystery, for instance, why McGlashan has not been called down to Kingsmead to work with and, more importantly, talk to Bodi. Even then, this might not be enough. Leg spinners need encouragement and constant reassurance and, it often seems, a perverse and stubborn nature. Certainly, you have be a little different to bowl the thousands of full tosses and long hops which surround the perfect leg break, the one which lands and fizzes and strikes fear into the heart of the batsman.

It is the one area in which South Africa is sadly lacking. Who knows what a leggie might have done in tandem with Henderson on Tuesday? Come to think of it, who knows what Warne might do in Sydney later this year?