For much of the next two months Ben Stokes’ trailblazers will be passing through some of India’s remotest cricketing outposts, aiming to pull off the near-impossible. Phil Walker assesses what chance, if any, they have. This article first appeared in issue 74 of Wisden Cricket Monthly.
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The news dropped with a thud, then a shrug. The first thought: never has the gulf between India’s maestros and England’s own slows looked more chasmic, more gapingly unfillable. Three of the four spinners named in England’s touring party for India were revealed to be pure greenhorns, boasting a single Test cap between them (Rehan Ahmed) and three five-wicket hauls across the entirety of their combined red-ball careers. Against this, Ravichandran Ashwin, Ravindra Jadeja and Axar Patel.
Rob Key, England’s sardonic MD, explained it away with a line at once pragmatic and damning: selecting players with the right attributes for an India tour is such a specific task, he said, that you almost have to “disregard what happens in county cricket”. Only once the sharpness of that line had softened did it start to make a fuzzy kind of sense.
Key’s pragmatism is two-fold. In part the thinking stems from the slightly desperate sense that they’ve literally tried everything else, so why not attack the problem laterally, combining the modernist ‘data points’ of the sort that pertain to ‘high release points’ and ‘speed through the air’ with, well, a beguiling intangible – let’s call it the endless promise of the unknown. Such an approach would be entirely in keeping with the Stokesian philosophy, and will have been heartily backed by the man himself.
And there is a little more to it. For in their ways, they each offer something unusual. Rehan Ahmed, 19, is a wrist-spinner, armed with a rapidly improving leg-break, who can bat; left-armer Tom Hartley, the Axar clone, predominantly fires in sharpish stump-to-stump darts with white balls; and the spindly Shoaib Bashir, 20, has the longest fingers in Europe. Each of them present something out of the ordinary, at least among the artisans of English cricket’s spin fraternity. If England are to play a lot of Test matches in India over the next two decades, they need to nurture some talents who are at least physically suited, if not yet experientially, to the singular strangeness of the job.
Much will rest, then, on the shoulders of Jack Leach, whose return from injury after missing the Ashes with a stress-fractured lower back offers a fresh dimension to Stokes’ attack, specifically a slow bowler who can land it broadly in the right place. Stokes utilised Leach’s underappreciated virtues brilliantly in 2022, foregrounding him on seaming pitches, bowling him through the tough times, refusing his requests for boundary riders and keeping men up on the drive. In response, Leach felt duty-bound to blossom as a Test cricketer, his 10-wicket haul at Leeds against New Zealand his finest return to date.
Last time in India, under the more pessimistic captaincy of Joe Root, Leach kept his nerve after an initial assault from Rishabh Pant to harness an intriguing victory at Chennai in the first Test, a win against the head that briefly opened up the prospect of an epochal series. His dream delivery on the fourth evening to castle Rohit Sharma was the perfect template for how to bowl on Indian surfaces, and the ball will be replaying endlessly in his mind ahead of this one.
The only English bowler to get to double figures, Leach took 18 wickets at 28 in that series, digits that look good on paper until one moves up the list to find Ashwin (32 at 14) and Axar (27 at 10). This time, they have given him three support spinners and a bunch of interchangeable seamers to work in his slipstream. For Leach, it’s the biggest series of his career. He will need all the help he can get.
Tom Hartley was in Barbados with England’s ODI squad when he got the news, via a Brendon McCullum voicemail. It wasn’t a total shock. Key had been talking up his chances after Hartley impressed on a spin-bowling camp in Abu Dhabi in October. Still, he tells WCM, “it’s pretty weird to get your head around”.
Is he up for it then? Sharma, Rahul, Shubman et al? “Yeah, I think so! You know, the conditions will be in my favour, I bowl similar to what their boys do, so there’s no reason why I should be scared, you’ve just got to bowl at what’s in front of you.”
When announcing the squad, Key was keen to emphasise the Lancastrian’s physical attributes above other left-arm options, such as Liam Dawson. At 6ft 5in, Hartley relies less on flight than pace and accuracy. “I’m round about mid-50s mph, but with my height, I can’t really go up and down, my trajectory is normally down just because of my height, but that’s not a bad thing, it just makes me bowl that little bit quicker. Smaller spinners can take the pace off and give it that little bit more flight, but I’ve realised what I am and you’ve just got to work with it.”
Another touchpoint would be Monty Panesar, who was unplayable at times in 2012, the last time India lost a series at home. Driving the ball into the surface, Panesar literally upended Sachin Tendulkar on his home patch as one of 11 wickets at the Wankhede, proving it’s not entirely impossible for English spinners to outgun India’s.
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Panesar bowled in cahoots with Graeme Swann on that tour, and Swann has been back in the fold working with the current crop this winter.
“Our spinners haven’t got the 10 years of experience and heaps of first-class wickets that used to be a prerequisite for getting in the England team, but they have been picked on potential because spin bowling has been in the dirt for a while in England,” Swann told the Mail earlier this month. “These guys, other than Jack Leach, have little experience at home, let alone overseas, but after working with them in a training camp in Abu Dhabi, I’m genuinely excited by them.”
Hartley, for his part, knows the score. “I’ve only been to India once but the pitches just allow you to fire it in, you don’t even have to think about flight or guile or anything like that. You just let the pitch do the work. In county cricket the pitches are a lot flatter, so spinners have to use their wits a bit more, whereas in India you’re the one who’s meant to be in control. If you’re firing it in and hitting the seam, you’ll be ragging it past the edge.”
He adds the all-important kicker: “From what I hear, there’s no fear of failure. If you want to bowl something, you bowl it, and as long as you own it and commit to it, then it’s gonna come off, and there’ll be no one telling you off for expressing yourself.”
Does he have a magic ball? “I’ve got a ‘carrom’ ball,” he says. “It’s almost there. It’s easy to bowl it in the nets, I’ve bowled it a few times in county cricket and a bit in white ball, but with the style of play that England are after, given a chance, hopefully I’ll flick it out for yer…”
In 2021, England’s Chennai heist so panicked the local brains trust that a series of turners were hastily prepared, with the third Test at Ahmedabad turning into a particularly grubby crapshoot. Joe Root’s spell of five for eight on day two probably directly impacted on England’s unhinged second innings as any semblance of order collapsed in puffs of cracked red soil. The word is that the pitches, while rarely following a set pattern, may be sturdier this time round, and there is a strong argument that this will suit India overall, as the more complete and hard-nosed cricket team. But then again, England’s lunatics were meant to come unstuck last winter on the flattish tracks of Pakistan and still out-whacked them to win 3-0. The wild savage beauty of a Stokes team is that nobody knows.
Root will have a huge role to play, and not just with the bat, where he’s five reverse-scoops away from becoming the heaviest runmaker against India in Test history. With the captain unable to bowl, he’s the only bowling ‘all-rounder’ option in the top seven. Root could well become Leach’s main support spinner.
There are so many other issues. Which version of Zak Crawley will we get? The one who enquires which strip they’re playing on, or the one who marmalises you in a session? Can James Anderson somehow roll out ten more scalps for 700? Will Ben Duckett sweep Jasprit Bumrah? And can Mark Wood stay fit for the finale on a quick one at Dharamsala?
The smart money, not to say the overwhelming weight of history, says India will steamroller the English and we can all get on with our lives. All evidence points that way. But strange things happen when iconoclasts take over an institution: they turn it dangerous. Prepare to be surprised.
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