S Berry: Old Trafford puts new spin on an old home-team inadequacy (5 Jul 1998)

5 July 1998

Old Trafford puts new spin on an old home-team inadequacy

By Scyld Berry

OF ALL the inadequacies of English cricket which have been laid bare in this series, one has been the flaccidness in the field. Between each Test, unlike the South African tourists, England's cricketers have to do things which are utterly irrelevant to the series in hand, like playing fatuous first-round matches against minor counties - when what they need is to be locked away for a week with Bobby Simpson, the old iron-handed Australian coach, to be drilled at fielding practice until it hurts.

The second major inadequacy was not so apparent on the seamers' pitches of the first two Tests as it has been at Old Trafford. Here, simply, England have had no bowler to take wickets on a hard, dry pitch beyond a less than fully fit Darren Gough.

If England are ever going to rise to the upper division of Test-playing countries, they have to find a wrist-spinner. All the Big Boys have one. If Shane Warne's shoulder disables him this coming winter, Australia have lined up Stuart MacGill to take his place in the Ashes series.

While Warne has taken 313 wickets in his 67 Tests for Australia, Mushtaq Ahmed has taken 160 in 38 Tests for Pakistan. Anil Kumble does not turn the ball sufficiently to run through sides outside India, but on home pitches he does enough to have an overall record of 197 wickets in 46 Tests. These bowlers are taking more than four wickets per Test on average, and even Paul Adams, the rookie, is averaging more than three. Yet there has only ever been one England spinner to take over 100 Test wickets at an average of four per match, Jim Laker.

Since Laker's day, moreover, English pitches have changed. Not only are they covered, they are also tempered with marl and loam. The ball bounces on such pitches, but they never wear and tear like the natural ones of old. They have become like pitches in Australia and elsewhere abroad, where finger-spin passes time rather than the bat.

Realising the urgency, the England and Wales Cricket Board have started a search for future wrist-spinners. Last winter Graham Saville, the ECB's technical director, wrote to all 38 county boards asking for wrist-spinners from the age of 12. It is indicative of the paucity after decades of discouragement - from unsympathetic captains, pitches, one-day cricket, and cheap, ungrippable balls - that only 24 counties had anyone to volunteer.

Out of 150 nominations, 41 young wrist-spinners were selected and invited to Lord's in May for a coaching session with Terry Jenner, Warne's mentor. Jenner emphasised the importance of the legbreak as the stock ball and of strengthening the shoulders when young to avoid injuries like the one which threatens Warne's career.

The best dozen were then creamed off and allotted one of five mentors. The five are the former Pakistani allrounder, Mushtaq Mohammad, who lives in Birmingham; Harry Latchman, the former Middlesex leg-spinner originally from Guyana; Peter Sleep, the South Australian who now coaches Lancashire Second XI; and two Englishmen, Robin Hobbs, once of Essex and Glamorgan, and Peter Kippax, who would have bowled a lot more for Yorkshire but for the native mistrust of twisty stuff.

All the teenagers have to send in performance sheets detailing their progress through the summer.

In addition to the 41 aspirants are two others higher up the ladder. Chris Schofield of Rochdale is already contracted to Lancashire, an England Under-19 representative, and on the verge of a first-class debut.

So keen is the England coach David Lloyd to promote Schofield that he was an England 12th man yesterday. And so keen is Schofield himself that the one main qualification made about him is his youthful enthusiasm, an excess of a virtue, which prompts him to strive for wicket-taking variations a little too much, rather than relying on the stock legbreak.

In the more immediate future Ian Salisbury will soon have his chance again, and such has been his improvement since he spent the winter studying in Australia that he might become a four-wickets-per-Test bowler against a lower division country, like New Zealand who tour England next summer. Whether he has improved enough to contain, let alone dismiss, Australian batsmen should be discovered this winter.

In the meantime the procedure of searching for wristspinners is incomplete, and the formal channel of writing to counties not enough. An Anglo-Australian legspinner has slipped through the net because he is at Oxford University, where he has played for their first team, not with a county. West Indies last winter found their legspinner, Dinanath Ramnarine, in their Indian community: the ECB, if they are serious, have to seek among our Asian communities who play so much of their cricket outside the traditional structure.

Numerous young legspinners also fall by the wayside, as illustrated by the presence in the England team of two former exponents, Nasser Hussain and Mike Atherton, who no longer bowl at all. Many have to be called for even one to be chosen as a future England match-winner.

Source :: Electronic Telegraph (https://www.telegraph.co.uk)