Cricket World Cup: Wrist spin and bumper barrages make for some spectacle

So far the World Cup has been better and more interesting than I thought, even feared, it might be. Scoring has by today’s ODI standards been agreeably modest. Bowlers haven’t been sacrificial lambs. Instead there has been in most matches a fair contest between bat and ball, and that is something to be welcomed. Excited forecasts of innings scores of 400 – even, surely absurdly, the first ODI total of 500 – haven’t been realised. That may change of course, if we get a couple of weeks of scarcely broken sunshine. No doubt, the tournament so far has been a bit disappointing for those who measure happiness or satisfaction by the number of sixes hit, but comparatively low-scoring matches are often more interesting and more exciting, because – odd as it may seem – in such games there is more pressure on both batsmen and bowlers.

There are some things I don’t like to see. Praise for a “hostile bumper barrage” is one, and it was distressing to see that fine classical batsman Hashim Amla retiring for a head injury assessment after being struck on his helmet by a very fast ball from Jofra Archer, which seemed to have been deliberately directed at the head.

In all first-class and international cricket the bumper has always been a weapon in the fast bowler’s armoury. But there’s a significant difference between Test or County Championship cricket and the limited-overs game. In the former the batsman who is not happy playing the hook shot will sensibly take evasive action, demonstrating to the bowler that he is expending energy in vain. In limited-overs cricket, the batsman has to keep the score moving. A dot ball is a little victory for the bowler. So the batsman has to risk the hook and, since it’s very easy to misjudge the pace and height of the ball, there is always the likelihood of a top edge or a miss-hit, and being caught. So, from the point of view of the bowler, a bumper barrage makes sense. He may go for runs, but he may get a wicket or dot ball.

There are lots of examples of what can fairly be styled intimidatory bowling in Test cricket too. Everyone knows about Larwood and the Bodyline series of 1932-3 – at least I like to think that all cricket-lovers do. At the time there were those who said that the only differences between that series and the 1921 Ashes in England when the Australian fast bowlers Jack Gregory and Ted MacDonald had the ball flying round English batsmen’s heads was, first, that Douglas Jardine, England’s captain in the Bodyline series, had Larwood bowling to a packed leg-side field, both close to the bat and in the deep, and, second, that the Aussies had made more fuss about it than the English had a few years previously.

Few would doubt too that in the years of West Indian supremacy, their battery of pacemen often overdid the fast short-pitched stuff. Few who saw it will have forgotten the barrage directed at England’s elderly openers, Brian Close and John Edrich, at Old Trafford in 1976. That was in pre-helmet days, and it was reckoned that in more than a dozen overs there was scarcely a single ball that would have hit the stumps, but plenty that hit the batsmen.

England at present are in the position of having more good ODI batsmen than Test match ones. Jason Roy, Eoin Morgan and Jos Buttler are all outstanding in the limited-overs game and one often finds oneself amazed by the power of their clean hitting, and, in Buttler’s case anyway, extraordinary virtuosity. Yet Roy has never played Test cricket and his record for Surrey in the County Championship is pretty average. Morgan’s Test career began quite well but didn’t last long, and almost nobody now suggests he should be recalled to the Test side though I suppose that in the old days the selectors might have picked him as captain when Alastair Cook retired, thinking that, like Mike Brearley in the 1970s, he had leadership skills that outweighed his deficiencies as a batsman. It might not have been a bad idea if only because it would have given our best batsman, Joe Root, two or three more years in which, without the burden of captaincy, he could concentrate on scoring runs.

Buttler has had some success in Test cricket since his slightly surprising recall last summer. Nevertheless, he hasn’t – so far – done anything to suggest that he is going to finish his career with a Test match average over 40. Like Roy and Morgan, he often plays offside strokes with his feet a long way from the ball, all right in one-day cricket, not so good in Test matches where you have an array of slips and a gulley or two ready to snap up the edge. But whereas both Roy and Morgan are stiff-armed, Buttler is wonderfully flexible. So he may establish himself as a genuine Test batsman, rather than as, at present, only a very useful man to have at 6 or 7.

One of the happier consequences of the amount of 50-over and T20 cricket now played is that wrist-spin has come back into fashion. Almost every county now wants to have a wrist-spinner for the shorter form of the game anyway. Yet, though Adil Rashid has now played a fair bit of Test cricket with some success, he is still regarded by pundits with a certain distrust.

Given that nowadays England rarely go into a Test, at home anyway, with two slow-bowlers, Rashid is almost always the one to be omitted. Likewise, no matter how successful county wrist-spinners may be in the shorter forms of the game, they rarely seem to get much opportunity in 4-day cricket. When they do play in the championship, they are usually poorly handled by their captain, given the ball only when it is getting soft and a couple of batsmen are well set.

They are also victims of the belief, expressed even by usually sensible pundits like Bob Willis, that wrist-spinners are bound to be inaccurate and more expensive that other bowlers. This notion used to infuriate C S Marriott, a Dulwich schoolmaster who bowled wrist-spin, very successfully, for Kent in the summer holidays. Back in the 1960s he wrote a splendid book The Complete Leg-Break Bowler which I would recommend to any apprentice in the craft. Moreover, the idea that leg-spin is inevitably expensive seems very silly when you look at the records of the four great Australian leg-spinners of the last hundred years: Clarrie Grimmett, Bill O’Reilly, Richie Benaud and Shane Warne, all much more successful in attacking the batsman than batsmen were in attacking them.