Dom Bess is England’s incumbent Test spinner, but should he be? CricViz analyst Ben Jones takes stock of the Somerset offie’s summer so far.

It’s been a strange summer for Dom Bess. More so than for the rest of England’s bio-secure bunch. He may have made his debut back in 2018, but this summer was the real start for Bess’ career as England’s first-choice spinner, a home season as the main man in the Test side.

Before the West Indies series, in the live-streamed intra-squad match between Team Buttler and Team Stokes, the most obvious winner was, well, Team Bess. He bowled very tidily, better than Jack Leach and Moeen Ali, and when the first team of the summer was announced there was broad agreement that he was the right man for the job. Tie that in with him being one of the leading Championship spinners of the last four years, and his selection was sensible, rational, and logical.

And yet, it’s not really worked out as planned. Not because he’s bowled badly – though we’ll come to that – but because he’s barely been needed. Not since 2001 have England bowled less spin in a home summer, and not since 2001 have they taken a lower proportion of their wickets through spin.

That’s partly a result of England’s slightly unusual balance. When England field four seamers (with Stokes ostensibly in an non-bowling role), the opportunity for Bess to bowl is obviously less. More bowlers means fewer overs each. But it also speaks to the fact Bess hasn’t been the most reliable for England this summer, taking seven wickets at an average of 46.00 across the five Tests.

People will talk about the drops off Bess’ bowling, which is fair. He has been deprived of wickets because of fielding errors. However – that isn’t going to change enormously. The average catch success in Test cricket is 80 per cent, and 75 per cent of chances off Bess’ bowling have been taken. He has been unlucky with fielding this summer, no question, but the flip side is that he’s been pretty lucky before this summer. One could suggest that spectacular catches like Ollie Pope’s to finish off the second West Indies Test speak to the way these things can even out.

Yes, he’s young; yes he can bat; yes he can field. But, on August 19, 2020, with Dom Bess having just played five Tests of a home summer as England’s first-choice spinner, does anybody think that he’s the best spin bowler in the country?

In home Tests, Leach averages 28 from five matches; Bess averages 44 from nine. Different pitches, different roles, but these are the numbers. You would be hard-pressed to find anyone, right now, who doesn’t think that Leach is a better spin bowler than Bess.

Against right-handed batsmen, the type which has made up the bulk of this summer’s opposition player, Leach averages 25 and Bess 36. There is no clear reason why, given the players England are facing, Bess deserves to be picked.

We can go deeper, and look at more advanced metrics. Our Expected Wickets model looks at the balls bowled and calculates what they would yield had they been bowled to the ‘average’ batsman. Last summer, Leach’s Expected Average was 31.1; this summer, Bess’ is 40.8. Moeen Ali’s Expected Average, in the 2018 and 2019 summers, was 28.4, summers including a Test so poor he was banished from the set-up. Performing different roles, against different batsmen, sure – but Leach and Moeen have simply been more threatening than Bess.

Perhaps the fact Bess is from Somerset is the only thing keeping the county die-hards at the door regarding his displacement of Leach. Leach is the county yeoman, the plucky operator with the Can Do attitude – but luckily so is Bess. They are from the same county and represent – in a simplistic world where all cricketers are metonymic – the same thing: good traditional county cricket values. There’s no culture war here, no angle, no hook for either side to perceive bias or agenda from the hoards. Nobody is at their keyboards complaining that Bess’ selection is disrespecting the shires.

Or perhaps it’s because there’s a general acceptance of what England are trying to do here. Bess is a younger, more complete cricketer than Leach. You can completely see why England are invested in him, why Chris Silverwood is keen to give this guy a run. Bess can bowl well, he can bat reasonably well, and field with the best of them. If Bess turns out to be England’s answer to Mitchell Santner, or a turbo-charged Ashley Giles, then that’s probably a success.

And yet, as it stands, Leach bowls a tighter length and has a lower economy in home conditions. If England want to groom an attacking spinner, Bess doesn’t seem to be the guy. If they want to groom a defensive spinner, they seem to have made the choice to pick a bowler without the skills, hoping he learns them along the way. That’s fine, and there’s a strategy there, but it’s a remarkably poor indictment of the County Championship’s ability to produce spinners. It might be a correct judgement.

This double-think, this over-think, is a marker of England’s desire to succeed overseas. In England, the need for a defensive spinner is less. The games are generally shorter, and the Dukes ball stays amenable for longer. There are, barring the odd exception, fewer passages between overs 50-80 where a bowling team needs to just sit with a spinner on, and hold. Away from home, the ability to bowl 20 overs and stem the flow of runs is far more relevant. England are so keen to find a spinner that can defend away from home, that they’re disregarding the ability of that spinner to do well – by both measures – at home. There are significant questions about whether Bess is the best man for this job, but it seems to be his role.

English cricket is always in tension over whether home dominance is enough. The last time they lost a Test series of any kind at home was when Sri Lanka roared home in a two-Test thriller back in 2014. The only Test England have lost this summer was when they picked the most overseas-style attack at their disposal: Mark Wood, all raw pace and Kookaburra-ready length, is not yet a bowler for English conditions, and while Jofra Archer may be the most talented bowler not named James that England have at their disposal, he is not yet as effective an operator at home as either Stuart Broad or Chris Woakes. When they stick to the formula, they’re a locked safe in England and Wales.

Bess might not seem like a straightforwardly “overseas” bowler, in the mould of Wood, but England are clearly trying to carve him into the missing puzzle piece for their touring series. They’ve ticked high pace; they seem to have ticked batting long at the top; now they need a spinner. For now, Bess is a passenger, but England seem to be invested in him learning on the ride.