‘When I started bowling, I tried to remember which way to turn’
Ian Salisbury tells a good tale about his Test debut. It was in the summer of 1992, and England were playing Pakistan at Lord’s. Salisbury was the first leg‑spinner England had picked in a generation, since Robin Hobbs in 1971. And he was treated, Hobbs said at the time, “like something that had dropped from the moon”. In the days before the Test, it became obvious that England’s wicketkeeper, Jack Russell, could not pick Salisbury’s bowling. So Russell and the coaches came up with a cunning plan. They told Salisbury he should communicate with Russell in code, by turning one way at the top of his run-up before he bowled a googly, and the other before he bowled a leg break.
In all the excitement, Salisbury forgot which direction signalled which delivery. “When I started bowling, I was trying to remember which way to turn,” Salisbury says, in Justin Parkinson’s book The Strange Death of English Leg Spin. “On top of the pressure of making my debut, it fu¢k€d me up.” It is a telling little anecdote. England were so confused about how to best use Salisbury that they ended up undermining him. And while he did just fine in that one match – he took five for 122, the Pakistan captain Javed Miandad among his wickets – Salisbury went on to have the stop-start sort of international career that, with the odd conspicuous exception, has been the lot of many English spinners since.
England have picked 21 different spinners since Salisbury, but only two have ever seemed to be all that secure in the job. One was Ashley Giles, who worked within limits, and the other Graeme Swann, who transcended them. None of them played more than Swann, who managed 60 Tests. Monty Panesar had a good run too, back when he was still fizzing with enthusiasm for the game, and so has Moeen Ali. But well as he has bowled at times, Moeen suffers because he has spent so long playing second fiddle on the county circuit, where he was often only filling in as a spinner, firstly as backup for Gareth Batty, then for Saeed Ajmal.
Which means that Moeen, 29, is still learning how to lead the attack. He said as much in the last Test, when he admitted: “I’m nowhere near where I want to be as a spinner.” So in Bangladesh, England seem to have been staging open auditions for the spinners’ positions, with Moeen, Batty, Adil Rashid and Zafar Ansari all competing against one another as well as the opposition. An all-rounder, a leg-spinner, an off-spinner, and a slow left-armer, one at the beginning of his career, two in the middle, the other nearing the very end. You could be forgiven for thinking England are not exactly sure what they are looking for, especially since neither of the two most successful county spinners from last season, Jack Leach and Ollie Rayner, are on the tour.
The reward for the winner will be a run in the team during the Test series about to start in India. Which may yet turn out to be a mixed blessing. Soon after that first match in 1992, Salisbury was sent on the winter tour to India, where his bowling was butchered by Mohammad Azharuddin and Sachin Tendulkar. His Test career never really recovered. The current four found the going tough enough in Bangladesh. And India will be even less forgiving.
Still, this is just England’s version of a common problem. Bangladesh’s captain, Mushfiqur Rahim, has just said that “our next challenge is overseas”. How to win away from home is not just England’s dilemma, but everyone’s. The win/loss ratio for touring teams in Tests is lower in this decade than it has been during any other in the history of the game, bar the 1990s. There is a slither of a gap in the stats between that era and this, but a far larger one in the number of draws. In the 90s, more than a third of games were drawn, in these past six years it is under a quarter. Which means that sides have never been so likely to lose when playing away.
This is not a new observation. It has been obvious since 2013 when the world’s away teams combined to win exactly three matches between them, two of them against Zimbabwe. And the key reasons for it – shorter tours, the scheduling of back-to-back matches, and the more aggressive, less measured techniques of modern batsmen – are all well known. Things have actually become a little better since, and in 2015 there were 12 away wins, among them victories for England in South Africa, for India and Pakistan in Sri Lanka, for Australia and New Zealand in England. But when you split cricket between teams either side of Asia’s borders, the divide is as wide as ever.
Since England’s victory in India at the beginning of 2012, they, Australia, South Africa, New Zealand and West Indies have won four Tests in Asia. In the same time the four Asian sides have won eight games outside of the continent, four in England, two in Zimbabwe, and two in the West Indies, where the pitches are now low and slow and more akin to the kind they find at home. Because that remains the essential difference, the surfaces, whether they take spin or pace, and exactly how well equipped each team is to adapt to conditions outside of their natural habitat.
So while Bangladesh must try to prepare themselves to play on pitches that suit quicks, and they have hired Courtney Walsh to attempt to do exactly that before their tour to New Zealand this winter, England push on into the subcontinent. Where their uncertainty about how best to bowl, and bat against, spin will be all too evident again, and, most likely, end up costing them the series.
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