Posted by “I hear you’re England’s spin bowler now, Joe. How did you get interested in that type of thing? Should we all be England’s spin bowler now? What’s the official line?“
England’s perfunctory ‘tour match’ against England Lions is underway and all is becoming clearer, team selection-wise.
Ollie Pope appears to have been deemed “the same sort of number three” as Ollie Pope and there also seems to be a plan to pack the bowling attack with right-arm seam bowlers, because historically that’s always worked out brilliantly in Australia.
On day one of England v England Lions, the England bowling attack comprised Jofra Archer, Gus Atkinson, Ben Stokes, Mark Wood and Josh Tongue. Shoaib Bashir just about scraped into the Lions XIII.
Shamefully, when we pondered England’s first-choice Ashes bowling attack a few months ago, we didn’t actually consider this eventuality. We assumed Bashir would play in a Stokes-led side, but that he’d make way for Will Jacks and a quick bowler when Stokes sustains his next injury.
When it comes to right-arm seam bowlers, we apparently erred on the side of the Tony Hayers view that there are too many of them, whereas England are more inclined to the Alan Partridge perspective: People like them. Let’s have some more of them.
But what does this mean for spin? In both red and white ball cricket, England have shown an appetite for a composite spin bowler. Without Stokes, they’ve tended to add Will Jacks as half a spinner and made up the rest with Joe Root, Jacob Bethell, or both.
But this warm-up match version of the England XI has no Jacks. Or Bethell. Which means Root becomes the sole spinner.
In keeping with the team’s recent history of muddling through with no proper spinner, this is so far going absolutely bloody atrociously. Root conceded 117 runs in just 14 overs and the one wicket he picked up was Matt Fisher.
We look forward to this being put forward as firm evidence of the pointlessness of spin in Australia.
Our first Test player of the match prediction: Nathan Lyon.
Follow the Ashes with King Cricket: get the email.
Revisit previous Ashes with us: buy our book.
As we keep saying, book retail logistics are just an absolute mystery to us. This is the state of play at the time of writing:
- Bookshop.org – says it usually dispatches within three weeks, but someone told us yesterday that it in fact arrived within just a few days
- Amazon – in stock again with sensible delivery times
- TGJones/WHSmith – still out of stock
- Awesome Books – in stock, but a couple of weeks for delivery
- Blackwell’s – in stock, but delivery times downgraded to “usually dispatched within 2-3 weeks”
- Hive – out of stock
