England’s reliance on Moeen Ali shows that English cricket is no closer to answering longstanding questions around the development of spinners, writes Yas Rana.
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There was a familiarity to Moeen Ali’s morning. His four overs on day three cost 23 runs before he left the field to receive further attention to his cut finger. He was made to toil for 33 overs across days two and three, bowling to breaking point and reopening wounds, literal and perhaps figurative, from the 2017/18 Ashes as Australia, with the encouragement of typically aggressive Stokesian field settings, took the attack to the England off-spinner.
On day two he bowled well, fulfilling his brief and was unlucky not to pick up more than two wickets. Today, as he battled that sore finger, and served up a pair of ugly full-tosses there will be understandable concerns about his capability to bowl long spells in the fourth innings on a pitch that has been receptive to turn since the opening day.
Taking a step back, it’s an extraordinary situation. A guy whose major early work in county cricket was as a batter – who was retired from Test cricket last week – bowled the second most overs he’s ever done in an innings in England, becoming England’s oldest spinner in a home Test since John Emburey in 1995 in the process.
Whatever you think of the relative merits and potential shortcomings of Moeen’s recall, the underlying truth is the absence of viable alternatives.
Two England spinners debuted and took five-wicket hauls in Pakistan last year. One of them is an 18-year-old leg-spinner who averages 67.66 in Division Two this year. The other has been required to bowl just 21 overs in four games in 2023 after only really taking the discipline seriously for the first time in 2022. It was totally understandable that neither was risked. Liam Dawson, another all-rounder in his mid-thirties, was the only realistic alternative to Moeen. Beyond them, the options are diminishing.
In 2021 four young English spinners – Dom Bess, Matt Parkinson, Mason Crane and Amar Virdi – were brought on the tour of India. Two and a half years later, Bess is the only member of the quartet to regularly command a first-team spot for their respective county sides in first-class cricket.
Virdi, while still a teenager, was an ever-present for Surrey as they won the 2018 County Championship, finishing the year as Division One’s leading English spinner. Fast forward five years and he’s not played a County Championship game for Surrey since the start of the 2022 summer. Virdi is effectively Surrey’s fourth-choice spinner behind Jacks, Cameron Steel – another all-rounder– and Dan Moriarty, a once-favourite of Rob Key but who himself has only played two County Championship matches since the start of last season.
Parkinson’s fall from the spotlight is the most dramatic. A regular in England squads across formats until last summer, culminating in a Test debut as a concussion sub, he has lost his Lancashire place in 2023. Mason Crane, a Test player at 20, is rarely afforded more than the occasional County Championship appearance for Hampshire.
Bess, who has a County Championship average north of 45 since the start of last year, is one of just a handful of regular spinners in the competition. When you focus in on specialist spinners, ignoring the all-rounders, they are an especially endangered species. Danny Briggs and Callum Parkinson can both hold a bat but it would be a stretch to call either an all-rounder. Liam Patterson-White at Nottinghamshire is a player in a similar mould, while Sussex’s Jack Carson – an England Lions spinner this winter alongside Patterson-White – is a regular at Hove. Mark Watt, a Scotland international who plies his trade for Derbyshire, is another.
It is remarkable that there are so few players performing a role that Stokes deems necessary at Test level in the county game. Such is the paucity of English spin options that as soon as a tweaker shows a flash of promise at county level they’re generally catapulted into the national pathway system. It is understood that Patterson-White, a bowler with one wicket at 228 in 2023, was close to a Test debut last summer after being tapped up as Leach’s concussion replacement in the second half of the season.
All the way back in 2015, the then-Middlesex spinner Ollie Rayner wrote that it was “not easy being an English spin bowler,” arguing that “we don’t play in conditions that help young spinners to develop.” In the same piece he infamously suggested that the best advice he’d give to young spinners would be to learn how to bat. And you can understand why. It is not unheard of for bowlers who are seemingly close to England recognition in their early twenties – like Adam Riley or Ravi Patel – to disappear from the professional game entirely by the time they reach 30. England’s greatest modern spinner Graeme Swann didn’t make his Test debut until he was 29 – spin bowling, more than any other discipline, demands patience. Now, spinners are ejected from the game before they have the chance to mature.
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The Schedule is obviously one issue. As Rayner explains, it’s difficult for captains to give young spinners enough overs for them to develop. But early season conditions aren’t totally prohibitive for slow bowling success. Durham spinners have taken three five-for between them this season. The ‘problem’ is that none of them have come from Englishmen, with head coach Ryan Campbell explicitly seeking out tweakers to fill an overseas spot.
These haven’t hailed from traditional spinning hotbeds either, with Durham employing Australia’s Matt Kuhnemann and New Zealand’s Ajaz Patel this season. The example of Matt Kuhnemann is interesting. He performed admirably on Australia’s recent tour of India despite minimal first-class experience and was potent for Durham in early April in his first county stint. Clearly, there is a way to develop young spinners without needing to radically alter your domestic systems. But as it stands, England aren’t doing so. Leach’s injury and the looming tour of India brings the conversation back to the forefront but English cricket is no closer to answering the questions posed by Rayner in 2015 eight years on.
For now, the imperfect answer, as it has been so often to so many questions over the past decade, is Moeen. Whether his finger and form can hold together until the end of July might go a decent way to deciding the destination of the urn. Beyond that, England’s spin clouds are gathering in the distance.
