One way or another, England’s quick bowlers are letting them down, which apparently means they have to drop spin bowler Shoaib Bashir again
3 minute read
Of the England bowlers who won the first Test for England, Ben Stokes, Gus Atkinson and Ollie Robinson are all, for one reason or another, unavailable for selection for the second Test. In now time honoured fashion, Brendon McCullum has weighed this pace bowling shortfall and concluded the best way to react would be by dropping the spinner, Shoaib Bashir. This is hardly surprising given he’s now working with Joe Root, who kind of started this whole spinner-free trend in the first place.
Jofra Archer, Matt Fisher and Sonny Baker are to join Josh Tongue in a four-man attack. If the pitch does spin, England will turn to Root and Jacob Bethell. The fact they have multiple options is significant because if you’ve got two mediocre-to-poor spin bowlers, you can fail to make the most of conditions at both ends.
The first thing to note here is that Bashir didn’t do anything wrong in the first Test. The second thing to note is that he didn’t do anything right in the first Test either. He didn’t do anything. The Home of Quagmires rendered him superfluous and he didn’t bowl a single ball.
But – key detail here – the Oval is a different pitch. It may be only four miles away as the crow flies, but different people do different stuff with it and it is consequently a different thing. There’s been much talk about how Surrey haven’t bothered playing spin bowlers in recent years, but less talk about how they’ve mostly been labouring their way through arduous, high-scoring draws this season while working to that same philosophy.
We would play a spinner. But then we would always play a spinner.
Aside from all the strategic reasons and our belief that Test cricket is all about evolving conditions and presenting batters with diverse challenges, failing to play a spinner also smacks of poor personnel management.
Maybe Root didn’t have much of a say in this one, but it’s hard to avoid thinking back to that time he and Chris Silverwood thought it would be a great idea to pick five right-arm fast-medium bowlers in Australia. Those two repeatedly went out of their way to pick no-one at all over Jack Leach and Jack Leach responded by losing all joie de vivre and deteriorating as a Test bowler.
England lost a lot of matches around that time and that resulted in Silverwood no longer being coach and Root no longer being captain.
They were replaced by McCullum and Stokes and initially these two went the other way: they picked Leach for every game.
Where their predecessors had said not merely that they didn’t rate Leach, but that they didn’t even value spin bowling as a craft, the new fellas picked him every game and Stokes gave him bags of overs. Sometimes he even asked him to open the bowling.
It was largely injury that saw Leach slip down the pecking order, which meant that when England continued picking Bashir after he recovered, it kind of came across as a big vote of confidence. ‘We think you’re better than our previous first choice who we clearly loved’ kinda thing. The bowler himself felt this to the extent he started to believe he was almost twice as tall as he actually is.
But then England stopped picking Bashir, and they stopped picking a real spinner, and they’re still doing it, and honestly it’s all starting to feel depressingly SilverRootish again.
And that’s where we are: Gus Atkinson’s on the naughty step, Ben Stokes stayed out past his bedtime and Ollie Robinson’s found a back way out of the team again, so England have dropped their spin bowler.
We’ll ask the question again: How tall does Shoaib Bashir feel right now?
