England off-spinner Dom Bess has had a breakthrough tour of South Africa so far.
Not originally picked in the squad, with both Jack Leach and Matt Parkinson picked ahead of him, he was called up as cover when the former fell ill, and played ahead of the latter when Leach failed to recover in time.
After impressing modestly in his first game of the series, the second Test at Cape Town, keeping the runs down without looking overly threatening, Bess came into his own in the third Test at Port Elizabeth, taking the first five wickets to fall in South Africa’s first innings to become the third-youngest England spinner to claim a Test five-for in Test history.
The performances have led some to say Bess should now be regarded as England’s No.1 Test spinner, leapfrogging the erstwhile Leach, who has claimed 34 wickets at an average of 29 in his 10 Tests so far. The complication is that both play for the same county, Somerset, where Leach is usually the preferred selection.
“I tell you what will be interesting this year,” said Sky Sports pundit Rob Key. “Dom Bess is, unless he gets injured, going to go to Sri Lanka. He’s arguably England’s No.1 spinner and quite rightly so. He then goes back, he’s not one of these cricketers that does the IPL, all the T20 stuff, all of that, he’s going to go back to Somerset where Jack Leach is, all things being equal, going to be fit.
It’s a credit to Somerset that they have produced England’s first- and second-choice Test spinners. But now they face a tough decision, of whether their assessment of the pair’s relative skills matches with England’s, and whether to prioritise club over country by keeping both twirlers for themselves.
