Adil Rashid is worth his place in the England side
As the rain falls at Lord’s I have been brooding on a piece Michael Brearley wrote a couple of days ago in ‘The Times’. Questioning the wisdom rather than the propriety of the decision to recall Adil Rashid, he suggested that Rashid, at 5 ft 8 inches, was perhaps too small to be a top-class wrist-spinner. This struck me as odd. There have been wrist-spinners who were tall, the great Australian Bill O’Reilly was at least seven inches taller than Rashid, and India’s Anil Kumble was, I think, over six- foot. But O’Reilly’s partner, Clarrie Grimmett, the first man ever to take 200 Test wickets, was a small man, often described as looking like a gnome. More recently Pakistan’s Abdul Qadir was shorter than Rashid and so, by four or five inches was “Tich” Freeman. About the same height as England’s assistant selector, James Taylor, Freeman took more first-class wickets than almost anybody ever.
The question of height is, I reckon, pretty irrelevant whatever you are trying to bowl. Tall fast bowlers may be alarming. But some great ones have been less than six foot tall: Harold Larwood, Ray Lindwall and Fred Trueman, for example. Argument as to which was the greatest of the great West Indian fast bowlers will rage forever, and in the Caribbean may depend on which island you come from, but I guess there would be few who wouldn’t include Malcolm Marshall in the top two or three, and he was a few inches shorter than Michael Holding and several more inches shorter than Curtley Ambrose.
Brearley went on then to suggest that Rashid hasn’t enough strength in fingers, wrist and shoulders to trouble the best batsmen. There may be some truth in this and one has indeed the impression that the majority of his victims in the County Championship have been lower-order batsmen. This may be partly because he has usually been brought on against top-order ones when a pair are well set, but, even if Brearley’s criticism is valid, one might reply first that there are fewer rabbits in the lower order of a county side than there used to be, and second that England in recent years have too often found it difficult to take the opposition’s last two or three wickets quickly and cheaply. If Rashid can do that regularly, he is worth his place in the side.
In any case, it may well be that he is a better bowler now than he used to be, and a more confident one. He dismissed Virat Kohli last month with the kind of ball that leg-break bowlers (and orthodox slow left-handers) bowl several times a day in their imagination and perhaps only a few times a season in reality. It was quickish, started on off-stump, dipped in, pitched on a perfect length, leg-stump or middle-and-leg, and turned sharply to hit the top of off: sheer beauty, leaving the Great Kohli looking amazed.
Some fifty years ago CS Marriott wrote a splendid book “The Complete Leg-Break Bowler”, a passionate defence of wrist-spin which then looked almost like a dying craft. One of his recommendations was that the wrist-spinner should master a variety of pace, and be able to turn his leg-break at speed. That was just what Rashid did to astonish Kohli, and if he can do it once he can surely do it again. Admittedly this was with a white ball, but Kohli wasn’t playing a One-Day attacking shot. He was trying to defend.
Marriott incidentally played only one Test: against the West Indies in 1933. He took 11 wickets for less than a hundred. It may seem extraordinary that he didn’t play for England again. There were two reasons, however. He was a schoolmaster (at Dulwich) and available to play for Kent only in August – the summer term in those happy days going on into the last week of July. Second, he was considered one of the worst fielders in England, at a time when most county sides had one or two fielders who were not distinguished for their athleticism.
In the same article Brearley wondered whether it was wise to have selected the 20-year-old, Ollie Pope, to bat second-wicket down – Vic Marks expressed the same doubt in a column in The Guardian – especially since it’s quite probable that the young man will come out to bat with England 20 for 2.
Nevertheless one might hold to the old adage: if he’s good enough, he’s old enough. There are plenty of players who have scored their first Test century at a tender age: Len Hutton, Denis Compton, Peter May, Colin Cowdrey, David Gower and young Pope’s captain, Joe Root for example. It’s true that all these would have played more first-class matches than Ollie Pope has (though most of May’s and Cowdrey’s before they played for England would have been for Cambridge University (May) and Oxford University (Cowdrey) in matches from which counties, even then, often rested their best bowlers.
Be that as it may, Ollie Pope has played fifteen first-class matches, and, though I don’t have the figures to hand, I guess that he has played at least as many matches in the County Championship as a raw young country boy from Bowral, born in 1908, had played Sheffield Shield ones when he was first picked to play for Australia against Percy Chapman’s England in the 1928-9 Ashes series. The lad made a hundred in his second Test, the first of nineteen he would score against England. Indeed, there having always been fewer first-class games in other countries than there used to be in England before the number of County Championship games was cut and cut and cut again, there are a lot of truly great batsmen who have made runs in Test cricket when young and inexperienced: Neil Harvey, Gary Sobers, Graeme Pollock and Sachin Tendulkar come quickly and happily to mind.