It's been over a year since Tom Hartley's rewarding debut tour to India. Since then, he's been overlooked in Tests, and failed to push past the fringes in the white-ball sides. Freshly recovered from an injury, he speaks to Aadya Sharma on his aspirations this season.
“The hand’s doing much better now,” says Tom Hartley, gingerly moving his right hand around during the interview. “I’ve been able to bowl, but batting and catching has been pretty slow”.
As part of Lancashire’s pre-season preparations, Hartley was briefly in India, the place of his Test debut a year ago. It’s now been a couple of months since a fracture during training forced him to leave the England Lions tour in Australia. Having missed Lancs’ first game of the season, Hartley is back in the squad for their second.
“We were only a week into our Lions trip, and I felt like I was doing well out there. So it was a shame, because I was enjoying it”.
It would have been a perfect precursor to the Ashes trip later this year, but Hartley isn’t assured a spot there either way: in Australia, overseas spinners haven’t played much of a role in recent years, and especially not English ones. Since 2015, England spinners in Australia have taken only 21 wickets, led by seven from Joe Root and including two from Dawid Malan. Hartley still has incumbent Shoaib Bashir to get past, as well as Jack Leach and Rehan Ahmed, if England go in with a spinner at all.
A year ago, Hartley was part of another touring England party, making his Test debut in India. It was the other extreme: for the opening Test, England had just one frontline quick. He opened the bowling in the first innings, and though he was on the receiving end of an assault from Yashasvi Jaiswal, he played a starring role in the second innings, snaring seven India batters in a historic win. It broke a record set 78 years ago for the best figures on England Test debut.
Hartley played all five Tests, finishing just four wickets shy of R Ashwin (26), the top wicket-taker of the series. But he hasn’t played for England since, with Bashir preferred at the start of last summer.
For the Pakistan tour, England brought back a fit-again Leach to pair Rehan Ahmed and Bashir. In New Zealand, they maintained the same spin group though Bashir was the only option used.
Crucially, between the India and Pakistan tours, came the County Championship, which would ordinarily have helped Hartley press his case. However, Lancashire’s star signing came in the form of Nathan Lyon, the best Test spinner around. Naturally, Hartley was pushed to a secondary role.
He ended up playing six games to Lyon’s eight – and took just five wickets compared to the Australian’s 26. A lot was made out of the dynamic: an overseas spinner, and an Australian at that, getting in ahead of a talented but raw Englishman. Coach Brendon McCullum said it would be “slightly mad” if Hartley and Bashir did not get enough county chances. Lyon insisted he was not here to take Hartley’s spot.
Hartley took it as a learning opportunity.
“Obviously I didn't quite get the game time when he was there, but at the same time, I still learnt a lot watching from the sidelines,” Hartley says.
In particular, it helped Hartley develop a skill crucial for any spinner, especially one on an Ashes tour in Australia: what to do when the tide turns against you.
“He had quite a good routine with his bowling, and especially when things weren't going his way. He'd have a few words, sort of a phrase that he'd run through in his head, and go back to that when he wasn't quite feeling, you know, himself, bowling.
“It is something that I've tried to look at and develop. Because obviously, in the heat of things, your mind can be scrambled, and you're not focusing on what you do well. That's pretty good for him to teach me, and then just watch him set up batters, really, because I think especially for right arm off-spinners, they have to work hard for their wickets, especially on English wickets.
“To watch him go about his business: changing his angles, changing his pace, talking to the opposition. It was such a joy to watch.”
Hartley is a keen observer of the game, picking up tricks watching India’s quartet – the now-retired R Ashwin, Ravindra Jadeja, Kuldeep Yadav and Axar Patel – dominate in the four Tests that followed Hartley’s seven-for.
“Just watching them, especially Jadeja, watching how he goes about it, his different variations and what sort of seam you want to put on it…” Hartley says. “A lot of the time, he would go barrel seam, and then watch him overspin a bit more, and just try to pick out when and why he would do that.”
In a way, Hartley might want to draw inspiration from Jadeja’s own career trajectory. At 25, the same age Hartley is now, Jadeja was more of a bowler than a batter, batting primarily at seven or eight. Jadeja’s batting improved significantly as his Test career grew, pushing aside specialist spinners, and he can now walk into the India Test team on the back of his batting alone.
Hartley, who averages 23 with the bat in first-class cricket, is now looking to work on his batting in a bid to improve his chances of an Ashes call-up, along with the lessons he learnt from Lyon. It could offer a point of difference to Bashir, who has shown little batting or fielding aptitude in his England career thus far.
“It’s always good to have goals for the season,” Hartley said. “If I can perform well in the Championship this year, I could be in the mix.
“Obviously, Australia is a pretty tough place to bowl spin. India is still tough, but the pitch is a bit more conducive to spin. Aussie pitches, you have to have a bit more of the top shape to really get that bounce like what Nathan Lyon does. So, I'll be trying to work on that this summer. And, fingers crossed, I can work on my batting as well, so I can play a bit more of an all-round role.”
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Few would remember Hartley’s ODI debut, a few months before his maiden Test. Against Ireland, he batted at nine, and went wicketless across ten overs, not playing any role in the next (rained out) game. That ODI debut, not long after his first List A game on an England Lions’ tour to Sri Lanka (Hartley has never played a List A game for Lancashire), reveals the challenges for a young English player trying to make their way in 50-over cricket. But he had already shown his value with the white ball during the 2021 and 2022 T20 Blasts, and his attributes, as a tall left-arm spinner who can strike the ball cleanly, mark him out as a limited-overs prospect.
A regular for Lancashire in the Blast and Manchester Originals in the Hundred, Hartley’s capped 92 times in T20s, but doesn’t have a T20I appearance yet. He came close in 2024, when England put him in the squad for the T20 World Cup, looking to capitalise on the slower surfaces in the Caribbean and North America. Eventually, Hartley did not get a spot ahead of the spin offerings of Adil Rashid, Moeen Ali and Liam Livingstone.
The effects extended beyond that tournament, puncturing a developmental summer for Hartley. While a call-up to a T20 World Cup squad would have been hugely encouraging, it also meant Hartley missed Blast matches while being on the sidelines. He admits being relegated to the nets affected his rhythm.
“Especially spin bowling, a lot of it is on feeling, feeling when a batsman might come down the wicket or back away. When you don’t bowl in games, you sort of lose the rhythm of that, picking up tendencies: picking up wind direction and where – the boundaries… sort of where you want to get hit, where you don't want to get hit.
“And it's easy in the nets just to bowl a lot, which I was doing in the West Indies. Coming back and then going straight into Blast matches, it was tough. Obviously, the rest of the lads were seven, eight games in already, and we’re doing well.
“So it felt tough to just fit in the side, to be honest with you. But you know, I'm sure that they came back pretty quickly. And you know from this year, hopefully going to play a whole season, and it should just be like normal this year, absolutely.”
A disastrous Champions Trophy, and a change of captaincy all points to an ODI reset for England. Hartley’s hoping a reshuffle revitalises his 50-over career as well.
“So, I'd like to think that it'll come quite naturally, obviously being white-ball cricket – but no, I'd love to be involved.
“Obviously their [England’s] performances – they know they haven't been doing as well as what they probably should think they'd be doing.
“So if they do have a reshuffle, if I can do well in T20s, that hopefully, that may give me a go.”
Hartley seeks inspiration from other top white-ball teams in the world, most of whom have one standout left-arm spinner. With the 2026 T20 World Cup scheduled in India and Sri Lanka, Hartley is hoping another role in the subcontinent – this time with the white ball – comes by.
“I think there is a key role for left-arm spinners. And maybe, that's something England will look at in the future, hopefully”.
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