The Strange Death of English Leg Spin by Justin Parkinson

Author:Justin Parkinson
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Pitch Publishing
Published: 2015-07-07T16:00:00+00:00

Nadir, Qadir And Clarke

‘I’d played a three-day game without anyone knowing my name.’

Andy Clarke

‘MOST commentators go all gooey and sentimental when a leg spinner comes on to bowl,’ wrote Rob Eastaway in What is a Googly?, an explainer of cricket’s terminology, ‘because for many years seeing a leg-spinner was as rare as spotting a black rhino.’

It is not a bad parallel. The global wild black rhino population saw a 96% decline between 1970 and 1993, from 65,000 to 2,300. Thanks to a well-organised conservation effort this has since risen to about 5,000.

Leg-spinners, like rhinos, had a tough time of it in the 1980s. Slow bowling in England itself became even more associated with containment. Televised Sunday League matches showed spinners, usually off-spinners, spearing the ball into middle-and-leg stumps. Flight disappeared. Even top-quality spinners like Middlesex and England’s John Emburey lost the ability to take first-class wickets for periods, such was their emphasis on keeping the run-rate down on a Sunday or whenever a knockout one-day competition was going on.

Yet this format of cricket cannot be blamed for the demise of leg spin in England, because Test captains were shunning it as early as the 1950s. One-day cricket, taking off in the 1960s, merely emphasised and reinforced a negative culture in bowling which had been developing for years. One would need a rhino’s hide to dare to bowl tossed-up leg spin in such a climate.

The rise of West Indies to become the undisputed best team in the world, usually relying on a four-man pace attack, made slow bowling in general look quaint. Leg spin in particular.

David Lemmon, biographer of Tich Freeman, calculated that in 1980 in English county cricket only ten men had bowled any leg breaks. Most of these were batsmen who occasionally had a twirl. Two of the others were Robin Hobbs and Pakistani Intikhab Alam. A year later even they were gone.

After Hobbs there were no frontline English leg-spinners left. No one to pass on the skills honed by Allan Steel, Bernard Bosanquet, Sydney Barnes, Tich Freeman and all the others.

More pitches favoured seam bowling, such as those Richard Hadlee and Clive Rice operated on to such effect for the successful Nottinghamshire side of the early 1980s. Further advances in fertilisers meant ever more verdant outfields and that the ball kept its shine for even longer than had been the case in the 1950s and 1960s.

Derbyshire’s Kim Barnett, best known as an England batsman, started his career as a promising leg-spinner. But he never got going, his best return being seven wickets in the 1980 season. He switched to occasional seam bowling.

The only glimpses most English fans got of leg spin were when foreign teams brought their own. Australia gave 38-year-old Bob Holland a debut in 1984. He played four matches in the 1985 Ashes series won by David Gower’s England, taking just six wickets at almost 80, but keeping the runs down. Queenslander Trevor Hohns was 34 when he made his bow in 1988. He did well in England in 1989, taking 11 wickets at 27.

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