If there was any notion that England would be challenged less by spin on home soil, that was banished by Yasir Shah’s first day with the ball of the series
George Dobell at Lord's15-Jul-2016Like bumping into the bully who made your school days a misery, England came face to face with an old and familiar foe at Lord’s.England have struggled against spin – especially legspin – for decades. If it wasn’t Anil Kumble crushing their hopes, it was Shane Warne, Muttiah Muralitharan, Mushtaq Ahmed, Saeed Ajmal or one of many, many more. Even Chris Gayle took a five-for against them at one stage.So we probably shouldn’t have been surprised when Yasir Shah ripped through England’s middle order here. He claimed the wicket of every England batsman from No. 3 to No. 7 and has every chance of adding more over the weekend.The concern for England is that this pitch – this second day pitch on which Moeen Ali could not turn the ball an inch – will probably be the least helpful surface that Yasir encounters this series. It was just the second five-wicket haul in a Test against England at Lord’s this century – Daniel Vettori took the other one in 2008 – and was achieved in conditions where the ball hardly turned. It suggests that, in conditions providing more assistance to spin bowlers, England are in real trouble. And for a side due to tour Bangladesh and India later this year, that must be a worry.Like Warne and Murali before him, Yasir fulfils a dual role for his side. Capable of producing, even in the first innings, wicket-taking deliveries, he also possesses the control and stamina to operate as a holding bowler. It is his ability to bowl long, inexpensive spells (he has an economy-rate of 2.55 in this match to date) that allows Pakistan to go into games with a four-man attack. By hardly delivering a poor ball, ensuring most of his deliveries will hit the stumps and varying his pace and angle just a little, he provides the side balance. Any criticism of England has to be mitigated by the realisation that he may well be the best spin bowler in the world.He also poses a dilemma for opposition batsmen. They can allow him to tie them down – as England allowed Ajmal and Abdur Rehman to tie them down in Abu Dhabi in 2012 on the way to being dismissed for 72 (they scored just 21 from their first 15 overs) – or they can try to disrupt his plans and hit him off a length, as Joe Root tried here.Root’s top-edged slow-sweep looked ugly. But one of Root’s great strengths – indeed, one of the strengths of this England team – is their bold approach. We cannot applaud them for their audacity and then scold them for carelessness when it goes awry just as we cannot criticise them for timidity and then complain when the bravery backfires. While Root might reflect that the choice of stroke – trying to fetch one from outside off stump through midwicket – was unnecessarily aggressive, he has scored vast quantities of runs over the last couple of years with that approach. It needs curbing only a little for the runs to flow.While Gary Ballance and Moeen Ali were dismissed by leg-breaks that turned enough to defeat their strokes, most of England’s batsmen were undone by Yasir’s accuracy and natural variation. Perhaps the ball to Root was flighted a little more; perhaps the ball to Jonny Bairstow was pushed through a little quicker. But James Vince, attempting to turn one through the leg side, missed a straight one and when Bairstow played back to a full delivery that scuttled through his forcing shot it brought back memories of the way Kumble dismissed another Yorkshire and England keeper, Richard Blakey, back in 1993. Little, it seems, has changed.Spin bowling will probably always be secondary to seam in England. The conditions naturally provide more assistance to seamers. If you grow up wanting to bowling spin in a wet summer like this, you might not have touched the ball yet. Seam, sadly, is often all that is required other than to pick-up the over-rate and offer some variation of angle or pace.But the situation does appear to have worsened in recent years and England’s spin-bowling cupboard has never been so bare. Men like Eddie Hemmings and Norman Gifford, who were limited to a handful of Tests each a generation or two ago, would bedazzle and bamboozle today.There are many reasons for England’s current issues with playing, or bowling, spin. One of them was the ECB’s decision to reward the counties for fielding young players which pushed a generation of experienced cricketers – not least spinners, who often enjoy the best years of their careers a little later than batsmen or seamers – into premature retirement. While it would be an exaggeration to claim that many bowlers of genuine Test potential were squeezed out of the game, it is fair to state that several good county professionals who might have tested developing batsmen and passed on tips to developing bowlers have disappeared.At the same time, there was a fashion in county cricket to produce green surfaces to assist the army of seamers that England breeds. That has resulted in few opportunities for young spinners (Ravi Patel, the Middlesex bowler rated by some judges as the most exciting spin prospect in the land, has not played a first-class this season and hardly played last year) and a reluctance from counties to invest in players they know will be of limited use to them.There is also a theory that the development of a young spinner in first-class cricket can be arrested by the requirements of limited-overs cricket. So, at a time when young spinners might be learning how to build long spells or experimenting with flight and bowling in different conditions, they are instead obliged to fire the ball in to prevent being slogged in a T20 match. And with the finances of the game increasingly geared to the white-ball formats, the counties seem more interested in developing players who bat a bit, field well and can bowl a couple of tight overs of spin instead of specialists. Would Monty Panesar still be able to forge a career if he was starting out today? Ravi Patel’s experience would suggest he might struggle.The ECB have taken steps to improve the situation. They have encouraged counties to produce better pitches (allowing visiting captains the option of bowling first in the Championship was designed, in part, to encourage spinners) and they are providing every bit of assistance they can to any developing young spinner: specialist coaching; overseas experience; exposure to the England squad at an early stage. But these things take time and, in the meantime, a generation of county batsmen are developing without encountering much high-class spin in the domestic game. Bowlers like Yasir feast on their inexperience. R Ashwin must be salivating at the thought of them.With a second innings to come, it is a bit too early to speculate on whether England will change their batting line-up before Manchester. Trevor Bayliss has repeated his theory that he would rather give a player a Test too many rather than one too few so it may be that Vince, in particular, is given a longer opportunity to prove himself.But, with Ben Stokes fit to return for Old Trafford, it is likely someone must make way. One option is drop a bowler – James Anderson is already likely to return ahead of Steven Finn – and another is to bring in either another spinner or a different one. Given England’s struggles against spin – and Stokes has some issues to resolve against such bowling – it may be they prefer to replace another seamer, presumably Jake Ball, with Stokes and strengthen the batting. Whichever way you look at it, though, Vince needs some runs in the second innings.
