England v India: T20s, Not so Much a Reality Check, as an Invitation to be Mugged in the Future

 

England v India: T20s

Not so Much a Reality Check, as an Invitation to be Mugged in the Future

February 2^nd 2017

It has been a recurring theme for at least three decades: England batsmen cannot play spin. It is getting to the stage where if England were to play a game against Addington 2^nd XI – my erstwhile weekend team in Kent, many years ago – the skipper would look at the fixture list, give a knowing wink, pick three spinners, ask the groundsman to shave off the grass and feel confident of winning.

England should have won both the ODI series and the T20s. In every game they could say that they were in a winning position and in four of the six games it came undone. Sometimes you come up against some brilliance that you simply cannot plan for: an Indian seamer bowling a brilliant final over; a pair of batsmen rescuing their side from apparent oblivion with fine, attacking batting. That is just part of the game. Chasing what is no more than a par total on a ground famed for its huge scores in T20 games, including two of the ten highest scores ever in T20 matches anywhere in the world and having the run-rate well under control, with two well-set batsmen at the crease, is not usually a prelude to losing eight wickets for eight runs in nineteen balls.

That England left Indian spinner Yuzvendra Chahal, not a name that would have most touring sides breaking into a cold sweat at the thought of facing him, with the extraordinary figures of 4-0-25-6, is an indictment in itself.

Jon Agnew recounts how he was following the game in his car, England just two wickets down, with Root and Morgan going great guns and pushing the score along at around 10-an-over, parked, got out, walked indoors and discovered that the game was already over.

What made it all the more unexpected is that Chahal had figures of 2-0-19-1 when he came back to take the fourteenth over, having shared the new ball.

In reality, the problems started in the previous over, bowled by Mishra. Root and Morgan had just taken an experimental over from Suresh Raina for 1 6 6 w 6 1 1 – 22 runs that left England 114-2, with a quite comfortable equation of 89 required from 48 balls. With the wheels threatening to fall off the Indian wagon, Mishra bowled an superb over that went for just three runs, including a wide and that should have seen Joe Root out, caught. When Root escaped because Yuvraj and Pant collided chasing the ball, a more confident side would have made India pay dearly for the mistake. Instead, it seemed to induce panic.

After 12 overs, India had been 99-2, England were 114-2 and well ahead.

Even after the quiet 13^th over, England were still significantly ahead of India at the same stage. It was all set up to go down to the wire. Without England ever bowling badly, India had scored 70 from their last 5 overs, so the England had every right to expect that they would be capable of something similar.

Chahal’s first two balls were innocuous – a short, wide delivery and a flighted wide delivery – but, critically, they went for just two singles. So, a sequence of ten balls had produced six singles, a wide and a comedy drop. Pressure was mounting and you could almost see the mental calculation: “the next ball has to go, whatever happens”. It did. Googly. Straight up in the air from the edge of Morgan’s bat. Batsmen cross. Next ball. Flipper. Root makes the same calculation, misses and is pinned straight in front.

England have lost both set batsmen and, what is just as bad, the run equation has gone up to 84 required from 36 balls. Loads of batting to come. Buttler and Stokes at the crease. The problem now though was that they would need to swing like crazy  from the off and that every dot ball would be a tragedy that would simply ratchet-up the pressure. With panic growing among the batsmen it was a matter of the bowlers playing on that panic, which Bumrah and Chahal did brilliantly. Chahal alternated short balls and googlies on frazzled batsmen, to devastating effect.

The final killer was Chahal’s third-last delivery. Ben Stokes had just launched one through Long-on. The next ball was short, whacked hard and was almost a six. Ten from two balls would have put England back with an outside chance (albeit an unlikely 70 required from 26 balls, with four wickets left), quite apart from getting Ben Stokes’s adrenalin flowing. Instead, Suresh Raina jumped, plucked the ball out of the air, overbalanced, avoided the rope by millimetres and put the stake right through England’s heart. Instead of a six, England’s last front-line batsman was gone and, with him, the match.

The collapse was epic:

W W . . | . W 1 1 1 1 | W . 4 W . W | W . W

This will be added to the legend of England’s incompetence against spin bowling.

Of course, events last season may change things radically. The new regulation on the Toss in County cricket did see a resurgence of spin bowling and Somerset’s late-season charge saw county batsmen having to fend for themselves against rampant spinners on turning tracks. The fact that the equal-highest wicket-taker of the season was a county stalwart spinner in Jethan Patel, with Somerset’s Jack Leach just one wicket behind, gives hope that batsmen may yet start to come into the England side after a searching spin examination in county cricket. However, going further down the list of leading wicket-takers in county cricket in 2016 reveals just one more spinner – Middlesex’s Ollie Rayner – before thirtieth place in a list dominated by medium and fast-medium right-armers. Of the four spinners in the top thirty wicket-takers, three were veterans and two of England’s winter tourists did not even make it into to top fifty in the list.

The ECB either persist with their attempts to bring spinners into the game in the County Championship – a policy that will take at least five years to bear fruit -  or face the prospect of England batsmen being mugged time and again on spinning tracks all around the world. The response though is not encouraging. With the reduction in the Championship, the early-season, seam-friendly pitches will play an even larger part in Championship cricket, with an even shorter window for spinners to weave their magic on dry, sun-cured tracks. It may turn out to be an incredibly short-sighted policy in the long run.