A Salient Example Of The Problems With English Cricket

I recently came across an article in which Ashley Giles bemoaned that English batsmen get very little exposure to unorthodox spin until they hit test cricket.

He suggested supporting English spinners who bowl unorthodox deliveries like the doosra, instead of quietly managing them out of county cricket. That’s a fair point: other countries’ spinners will not stop the practice just because the English Cricket Board thinks it’s dodgy. Foreigners do a lot of dodgy things. Always have and always will. But in the case of cricket, the option to exclude them from a “gentleman’s club” of people who bowl with a straight arm is long past.

The article made reference to an event which is symptomatic of a much deeper malaise in English cricket, one entirely of its own creation. It was that Hampshire were docked points in a County Championship match for preparing a wicket with excessive spin.

When I saw this statement, I imagined teams shot out for under 100 by journeymen off spinners. But no, have a look at the scorecards. All four innings reached around 200. South African test spinner Imran Tahir could only manage match figures of 4/110. An average county level off-spinner who took 6 in the first innings couldn’t take a single wicket in the second.

Hardly a sub-continental style minefield of the sort India prepared for Australia in 2004 in Mumbai or in 2013 in Chennai.

If the ECB seriously believes a pitch on which teams can score 200 spins “excessively”, it’s no wonder their batsmen struggle against anything other than gentle off spin. They clearly are not living in the real world. While people like this remain in charge of English cricket, their test team’s brief period of dominance over Australia will be just an aberration.

Also, have a look at Nottinghamshire’s 4th innings run chase on this apparently excessive turner. They fart arsed around to get to 4/149 in 66 overs, needing another 53 off the last 6. They then fell 4 runs short, still with 4 wickets in hand.

That tells me pretty much all I need to know about why England can’t beat Australia.