England still in a spin

How the spinners of the world must get twitchy fingers when they see England on their team’s schedule. No matter who is selected or where they are playing, English batsmen have continued to demonstrate an innate inability to survive quality spin bowling with any degree of success. From Shane Warne to Harbhajan Singh, England have continually been found wanting when it comes to handling any variety of spinner.

They may have climbed the Test rankings on the hard-working, committed team ethos of Nasser Hussain and have the results to prove they are a legitimately improving team (from two years ago, they could hardly have sunk any lower), but a fundamental English susceptibility to tweakers remains.

It has been this way for so long that perhaps it no longer receives the scrutiny it deserves. It has seemingly become an accepted fact that when it comes to playing spin, English batsmen are no better at it than when Warne first began tormenting them with ripping leg-breaks and flippers eight years ago. The evidence is overwhelming.

Warne, no longer the consistently potent force he was in the mid-90s after finger and shoulder surgeries, had another woeful tour of India at the beginning of the year. Yet on the happy hunting grounds of England in the Ashes contest which followed that series, amid speculation his career was nearing its end and despite having made no discernible change to his bowling, Warne reaped 31 wickets at 18.70 against his familiar bunnies.

Back in Australia again, Warne captured just 6 wickets at 71.66 against New Zealand in the first, albeit rain-reduced, half of the Test season. With Aussie crowd favourite Daryl Cullinan not part of the South African squad and undoubtedly lots of planning having gone into their methods, there is no guarantee the Proteas are going to roll over for him this time, either. England is now the only team against whom he enjoys consistent success.

Similarly, Harbhajan Singh had a breakout series against Australia, with his memorable 32 scalps at 17.03. In six subsequent Tests in Zimbabwe, Sri Lanka and South Africa, Harbhajan collected only 15 wickets at 46.2. Lo and behold, back home against England, he has added another five-for to his tally.

And what of Anil Kumble? An experienced and wily bowler at home, Kumble has nevertheless only recently returned from serious shoulder surgery and had an unproductive series (7 wickets at 58 including the third match) feeling his way back into action in South Africa. Despite bowling on a home track not offering him alarming bounce or turn, Kumble suddenly returned 6/81 as English batsmen played back when then they should have gone forward, missed top-spinners, and generally made a hash of batting against spin by losing seven wickets in a session to go down by 10 wickets.

On the positive side of these spinning woes, England may have unearthed a promising tweaker themselves in Yorkshire offie Richard Dawson who, despite making his debut in the most demanding possible circumstances for an inexperienced spinner that is bowling to India at home, seemed unafraid to give the ball a nice loop in returning 4/134. Incredibly, he was probably going to be relegated as a back-up to Robert Croft, who was selected along with first-choice slow bowler Ashley Giles but actually declined to tour. Croft, whose absence is more of a blow to a gleeful Sachin and co than it is to England, has surely thrown away what limited future he probably had.

One wonders how selectors manage to overlook people like Dawson and New Zealand’s Lou Vincent when there are seemingly less gifted players ranked ahead of them. Perhaps if England possessed a respectable range of spinners themselves they would become more adept at facing them in action, although that has not really held true in the case of Australia and Warne.

To be fair to England, they did achieve much-trumpeted successive series victories in Pakistan and Sri Lanka last year (when did you last do *that*, Australia?) against premiere off-spinners Muttiah Muralitharan and Saqlain Mushtaq. Upon closer inspection of those series figures, Saqlain still claimed 18 wickets at 23.94 while Muralitharan took a comparatively meagre 14 at 30.07. Evidently learning from the Pakistan tour, England’s success against Muralitharan lay in playing out an enormous number of overs, as Murali sent down a phenomenal 236 overs with an economy rate of just 1.78, but at the high strike rate of 101. In that sense, England got the better of him by reducing his rapid wicket-taking potential.

Indeed, if there is one thing you associate with modern English batsmen doing successfully, it’s surviving stoically with for long periods of time. In the first Test at Mohali, they could not manage even that, crumbling in 76.3 and 77.4 overs in the first and second innings respectively. And though England may be weakened by the absence of key bowlers Darren Gough and Andrew Caddick, their batting line-up, minus the absence of Alec Stewart and the recently retired Michael Atherton, is first choice.

Ramprakash, Butcher et al are the best batsmen England can offer and overall they were unconvincing, even on a track that was by no means a turner of any description. With Andrew Flintoff at No. 6, more such rapid collapses (7/38, 7/76) are likely. If the specialist batsmen in the top five find survival difficult, the all-rounders and inexperienced tail have little hope.

So what is it about touring India that reduces Australian and English batsmen to a lunging, diffident, confused souls? The Aussies tried to counteract their deficiencies by charging, sweeping and taking the aggressive option, while the English method has previously been to blunt the effectiveness of spinners with sustained defence. Neither has worked consistently. Short of technical flaws or the wrong tactical approach, like trying to sweep Harbhajan’s faster arm ball or playing back to the Kumble flipper, perhaps it is simply a matter of familiarity and ability.

After the loss, Hussain was quoted as saying: "Our batsmen lack experience in these conditions" But to which conditions does he refer? Mohali, from all accounts, contains world class facilities, which Hussain praised. The pitch, as Ganguly said, was sporting, in that it did not excessively favour the spinners. Hussain even claimed it was one of the best he had ever played on.

If the Australian series early in the year and the Mohali Test are any indication, the raging turner that touring sides find unplayable is becoming a myth. With fast outfields providing easy boundaries, the "unfamiliar conditions" reasoning therefore lacks soundness, though if Hussain was referring to playing Harbhajan and Kumble in tandem, it’s understandable.

Allowances also have to be made for the highlighted point that it is an inexperienced England team -- the bowling attack in particular is all but unrecognisable to anyone outside of England and acquitted itself well -- but Thorpe, Butcher, Ramprakash and Hussain cannot be considered part of the "young" England. However, they do deserve a certain amount of leniency given English trips to the subcontinent have been so infrequent.

To that end, England’s administration has to take a good portion of the blame for the current team’s frailties. If they had been prepared to tour more often in the past, a core group of batsmen could have been better developed and more adept at handling slow bowling by now.

In the next 10 years, all teams should improve their away performances, or at least have excuses minimised for their failures, as they become more accustomed to a variety of conditions through the constant touring brought about the ICC’s organised schedule.

The tour of India was supposed to be a learning experience for England’s young team. So far, they have learned they are still clueless at playing spin.

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