There are cricketers you feel awestruck to watch, cricketers whose skill makes them seem almost superhuman, who have such grace, such power, such pace, they seem to come from another realm to the rest of us. And then there is Roston Chase. Chase bowls the sort of gentle off-spin that seems entirely within our reach, the sort of gentle off-spin which, in fact, really doesn’t seem all that different from the sort hundreds of club cricketers serve up every weekend of summer.
Chase is an excellent batsman but as a bowler he is doing valuable service for all of us hapless chumps who still daydream about succeeding in this game: he makes our ambitions seem eminently achievable.
The match was just coming up to an hour old when he first came on to bowl. Rory Burns had already weathered everything else the West Indies had to attack him with. He had seen off Shannon Gabriel’s thunderbolts and Kemar Roach’s snaky swing, had survived Jason Holder’s probing medium-pace and Alzarri Joseph’s waspish pace.
It was a horrible day for batting, too, cold, damp, overcast by heavy grey cloud, and despite it all Burns had come through the first bursts from three bowlers, Holder, Gabriel and Roach, who are all ranked in the world’s top 20 right now, and a fourth, Joseph, who will be too some day soon.
And then came Chase from around the wicket, three steps, four strides, and a slow turn of his long arm, a great lazy windmill of an action to deliver a ball that looped ever so slowly up and down along a straight line towards middle stump. And Burns missed it. It hit him on the pad, plumb in front. Burns seemed to be so confused, like a kid trying to figure out exactly how the conjuror had just found that pound coin behind his ear, that he chose to review it. Which only gave him, and everyone else, a second chance to see on the big screen that he really had just missed one that went straight on.
It was like surviving the first round of a heavyweight prize fight then knocking yourself out tripping over your stool as you walk back to the corner. At least Burns could argue that he’d been caught by surprise. Zak Crawley, on the other hand, steered Chase’s first ball after lunch straight into the hands of a leg slip that he must have missed when he was looking around the field. England, then, were 29 for two, and Chase was on a hat-trick. And then something strange happened. Chase’s next ball, to the new batsman, Joe Root, gripped and spun on the damp turf. Chase seemed almost more confused by the spin he was getting than the batsmen, and he started arguing with Holder about which line he should bowl, and to what field.
Still, he had his wickets. Chase has now had so much inexplicable success against England that you can almost see the veins throbbing in head coach Chris Silverwood’s forehead when he comes on to bowl. He has taken 61 wickets in Test cricket, and a third of them have come against England. In 26 matches against everyone else in the world, he takes his wickets at an average of 45 and a rate of one every 79 deliveries. Against England they come at 32 and 57. Which makes him one of the most effective spinners the West Indies have had in the years since Lance Gibbs quit. He should be the weak link in this West Indies attack, but you’d never guess it from his statistics. Most of those wickets were taken on that surreal day in Bridgetown back in January 2019, when he had eight for 60 against England without seeming to turn a single ball. It feels as if he’s had a grip on England’s batsmen ever since.
Just to put this in perspective, Chase is a much better bowler in Test matches against England than he ever was against the club sides of the Sussex Premier League, where he spent a season playing for Cuckfield in 2015. They seemed to know how to play him down at Bexhill, where his figures were 10-0-53-0, and at Billingshurst, too, where they were 11-0-59-1. By the end of the summer he was coming on at fifth change for Cuckfield.
Chase must have his strengths; he’s smart, no doubt, and tall, so he gets plenty of bounce. But really his biggest advantage seems to be that England’s batsmen continually over-estimate him, and therefore get themselves out playing for spin that just isn’t there. As soon as it started turning he was much less effective.
It was only when Ben Stokes came in that Chase looked, at last, like the rather modest bowler he really is. Stokes skipped down the pitch to clock him for a straight six, and dropped onto one knee to slog-sweep him for four. It’s a strange game, Test cricket, and all the better for it.
