England travel to India with three inexperienced spinners in their touring party. The tale of Ravi Patel, an England Lions bowler at 23 but out of the professional game at 27, is emblematic of the travails of the English spinner.
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Tours of India can be the breaking or the making of a player. England’s two outstanding Test spinners of the 21st century, Monty Panesar and Graeme Swann, both debuted in India. But they can also be an international career-ender, or at least a career-staller. Take Dom Bess, for example, who at 26 is young enough to come again as an England cricketer, but started the previous India tour as England’s lead spinner, lasted one Test and hasn’t been seen since in Test cricket. From Martyn Ball and Richard Dawson in 2001, to Zafar Ansari and Gareth Batty in 2016, India tours tend to throw up surprising names, and as often as not, they aren’t seen again.
It’s eight years now since former England captain Mike Gatting warned that spin bowling was a “dying art” in English cricket, bemoaning the paucity of opportunities young spinners have to develop their craft. A cursory look at the leading wicket-takers charts for the 2023 County Championship suggests little has changed in the intervening years. Only five English spinners took more than 15 Division One wickets, and of them only Jack Leach and Tom Hartley are not considered genuine all-round options.
The life of a specialist spinner in the county game is a precarious one. Opportunities to establish yourself as a regular first-team player are hard to come by, but should you get one, you’re never more than half a decent season away from at least an England Lions call-up given the short supply of spinners playing regularly. Take Josh de Caires, for example. The Middlesex youngster started the 2023 summer as a specialist top-order batter and it ended it on a Lions tour, a spot earned entirely by his developing off-spin.
Ravi Patel is one man who knows all about the highs and lows of what English cricket can give a slow bowler. Patel was a left-arm spinner of note whose highs saw him represent a strong England Lions side at 23 alongside four future World Cup winners as well as dismissing Virat Kohli at Lord’s but also the low of being released by his home county Middlesex at 27, two first-class appearances after taking 12 wickets in a match. Despite boasting a bowling average of 31 in first-class cricket, he wasn’t able to find a home elsewhere.
Patel’s story is a good example of the obstacles facing young English spinners. However exciting the talent, there is a real battle for even the best young English spinners to bowl the volume of overs needed to hone their craft. “The whole thing is the schedule,” says Patel, reflecting on his county career five years after his last first-class game.
“I was at Middlesex for nine years, but for so many years, I’d finished the season well. I remember in 2012, I came into the team for the last three games of the season. Last game that season, I got eight wickets, four in each innings, against Lancashire that won us the game to give us third.
“In any other sport, like football, if you finish a season and you’ve been the best player in the last game from the last season, you’re gonna play the first game of the next season unless you sign someone to take your spot.
“But then you’re not playing because the team needs a spinner who bats eight and can catch at slip and you can’t do that. So I said fine, then every year, the same thing would happen. So by about five, six years in I said, ‘Well, I might as well not be here in April.’ There’s no point – no matter what I do the season before. What I do in pre-season is absolutely irrelevant because of the conditions.”
After that 2012 bronze-medal clincher, Patel didn’t play again until mid-July, in Middlesex’s ninth game of the season. It was a similar story in what turned out to be Patel’s penultimate season as a professional cricketer. In 2017, Patel was restricted to just eight appearances across formats despite tearing up the Second XI Championship, taking his wickets at 16.76 runs apiece. Middlesex started the last game of the season 16 points out of the relegation zone but up against a Somerset side immediately beneath them in the table who had prepared a pitch that played to the strengths of their triple-pronged spin attack of Jack Leach, Dom Bess and Roelof van der Merwe.
Confronted by a pitch that “looked eight days old”, the draw was an unlikely prospect. Middlesex effectively needed to win to survive; Patel, out in the cold for much of the season, was thrust into the spotlight.
“It was a crazy situation,” says Patel. “I was doing really well in the second team – I just wasn’t getting a look in and I couldn’t understand why. I’ve not played the whole season and the club’s relegation hopes are going to come down to me.
“The pressure was so high for me because of all the circumstances. It’s not like I’m settled in the team – if you have a bad game, ‘Okay, you’ve at least done this and that in the season.’ I’ve done nothing in the season because I’ve never had a chance, then you throw me in for this! I’ll never forget that, the day before that game.”
To compound the pressure on Patel, he was the sole Middlesex spinner selected in the XI. After an understandably rusty start, Patel soon found his groove. He trapped Marcus Trescothick in front with one that “spun yards” before ripping through the Somerset line-up, finishing with career-best figures of 7-81. He followed that haul up with a second five-for in the match in the second innings. Middlesex lost as their batting unit suffocated under the stranglehold of Somerset’s spin trio but with 12 wickets in the game, Patel had more than done his job.
That winter, Patel played in all three games for the South against the North in what was effectively an expanded Lions camp in the Caribbean. He played two more first-class games the next summer before being released at the end of the 2018 season. Patel would never find another county and was out of the professional game for good weeks after his 27th birthday. A player deemed talented enough to merit England representative selection in 2014 and 2018 was lost from the professional game.
Patel’s story is by no means unique. In 2015, ESPNcricinfo compiled a list of the most promising six young spinners in the country, on which Patel was included. Of the others on the list, only Danny Briggs was anywhere near a regular feature in last year’s County Championship. Adam Riley played his last first-class game at 27, Zafar Ansari retired from the sport at 25, while Matt Carter and Mason Crane have almost exclusively featured in white-ball cricket in recent years.
More recently, England took four spinners aged 24 or below on tour to India three years ago, either as part of their squad or as a traveling reserve. In 2023, all four struggled for first team opportunities. Bess, who was England’s first-choice spinner throughout the 2020 summer, was twice farmed out on loan in search of playing time in the heart of the season. Crane, meanwhile, has played just five first-class matches in the past two seasons; four of those have come in mid-May or earlier. Fellow leg-spinner Matt Parkinson has moved to Kent via a loan spell at Durham to find regular first-team action after losing his place in the Lancashire side at the start of 2023. That is despite a career first-class record of 173 wickets at 25.85. When he did get on the park this summer, he fared well, taking 29 wickets at 29.
The most dramatic drop off is arguably that of Amar Virdi, the fourth young spinner taken to India in 2021. As a teenager, Virdi played an essential part in Surrey’s 2018 County Championship win, finishing the year with the most wickets for an English spinner in Division One. He was an ever-present in his team’s victorious campaign. Fast forward five years and Virdi hasn’t played a single game in either of Surrey’s two most recent Championship triumphs despite, like Patel seven years ago, dominating the Second XI Championship. Surrey have – successfully – honed in on a balance of side that almost never finds space for a specialist spin. In 2023, only 17 of Surrey’s County Championship wickets were taken by spin bowlers. And with so few games held in the middle of the summer when temperatures are at their highest, why would they veer away from that?
The gap between being a realistic England prospect and fighting for your professional career is frighteningly small. Nottinghamshire’s Liam Patterson-White was put on standby for England as a potential concussion replacement for the back half of the 2022 English Test summer. In 2023, he lost his place in the Notts side after five matches – his last finishing on May 22nd – and subsequently missed out on a spot in the enlarged, spin-heavy Lions training camp earlier this winter. Take a look around the country and Danny Briggs is the only specialist spinner over the age of 30 to have regularly played in the Championship last summer. To remain in the professional game at all is an uphill battle.
For Patel, it’s not just the schedule that is to blame for the poor job security for young English spinners. He is critical of the lack of specialist spin coaches, and the absence of spin-bowling development contracts, too. “Of course, there has to be [development contracts for young spinners],” he says. “That should be a given. I thought that when they released the recent contracts – all these development contracts are for fast bowlers, how can you not have them for spinners? You can’t expect to win in India, it’s not going to happen.”
Hartley and Shoaib Bashir are the latest two young English spinners plucked from the peripheries of the county game for the toughest tour going. On the trip where the most is expected of your spinners, England have turned to two bowlers who will start the 2024 summer as second-choice slow bowlers for their counties. Bashir wasn’t even in the first-class county system 18 months ago.
They may well succeed. There was a clarity in what England were looking for in their spin bowlers when assembling this squad and they can look to the performances of Australia’s Todd Murphy and Matthew Kuhnneman – two similarly inexperienced spinners – earlier this year as inspiration for what they might be able to produce. But if they do succeed, it will be in spite of the structures around them rather than because of them.
