With Adil Rashid’s selection stirring cricketing passions, Phil Walker tentatively welcomes the resumption of English’s deeply formal, standoffish dance with leg-spin.
Well, that escalated quickly. Ed Smith hadn’t even sat down to begin to explain, through the old fashioned thing of looking people in the eye and talking to them straight, why he and his fellow selectors had recalled the four-day exile Adil Rashid to the Test team. He’d barely begun unpicking the logic behind the call, and we’ll come to that later, before Rashid’s sometime and, one suspects, soon to be erstwhile employers, were releasing one of the tartest ripostes in living memory.
Mark Arthur, Yorkshire’s CEO, was the man who delivered it. “I hope,” he said, as the squad list did the rounds, “that England know what they’re doing to Adil and the county game.”
Doing to Adil! What, precisely, is England meant to be “doing to Adil”? What sinister acts of malevolence could be driving such a thing? Perhaps it’s some dark ploy to undercut the most effective wicket-taker they have in one-day cricket by throwing him to the five-day behemoth, but that doesn’t really add up. Or perhaps, I don’t know, they just feel that in the context of an abnormally dry summer, in which none of the other spin options have made a persuasive case for inclusion, he is the best option to take Indian wickets in a Test series.
“If they treat me like they have done,” he said of Yorkshire, “don’t see any value in me and are disrespectful to me, I have to think about the future in terms of which county I play for.”
If there’s one reasonably sure thing from this, it’s that the Bradford-born taker of 420 first-class wickets for his home county will not be taking too many more for them.
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And so to the only important question now: how will he go? Rashid has played 10 Tests to date. In those, he’s been sporadically butchered, and sporadically effective. (We may as well add all worthwhile England Test spinners of the last 40 years into that mix, perhaps excluding Graeme Swann.)
Five times from those 10 matches he’s taken four or more wickets in an innings, and seven times he’s conceded more than 100 in an innings. After those 23 wickets against India last time out, the next best tally was Moeen’s, with 10.
But here’s where it gets persuasive. Moeen is a far more potent bowler in English conditions. He’s done most of his good work on pitches that offer a little bit of this and quite a bit of that. He has taken 82 wickets from 28 home Tests at 33, against 51 wickets at 40 from 22 Tests away.
There has been no shortage of reasonable arguments suggesting that there’s a world of difference between white-ball and red-ball cricket, and that Rashid will be picked off, his bad balls punished, his one-day threat neutered by the differing requirements of the longer form. This may well play out. But there is no other persuasive option out there. At 30, with 13 years in the game, Rashid should know what he is by now. It’s time again for English cricket to resume its deeply formal, standoffish dance with leg-spin.
