Leggies. Googlymen. Chinamen. Mystery spinners. Australia chooses spin bowlers to take wickets, not merely to tie up an end.
Until now, that is. Andrew Hilditch, the chairman of Australia’s selection panel, recently enlightened us on his view of the role of spin bowling in Australia’s forthcoming Ashes campaign.
“The word attacking is a bit overrated really”, he declared. “...it’s about asserting pressure and performing the role the captain wants…Nathan (Hauritz, the only specialist spinner chosen) did that very well in the times he’s played, because we wanted to tie up an end, assert pressure from that end, keep pressure on batsmen and relieve the fast bowlers.”
Hilditch’s theorem is, in the words of Australian cricket’s (pub) philosopher-in-chief Andrew Symonds, un-Australian.
For the Australian cricket team, attacking spin bowling has invariably been a potent weapon to deploy against the English.
The first Australian purveyor of the googly, H.V. ‘Ranji’ Hordern, took 32 English wickets in the Ashes summer of 1911/12.
When Australia whitewashed the English five-nil in 1920/21, leg-spinner Arthur Mailey claimed 36 wickets. To this day no Australian has ever matched his feat, achieved at Melbourne, of nine wickets in a Test innings.
Leg-spinner Clarrie Grimmett, the Sly Fox, tortured English batsmen at home and away for a decade, starting at the age of 33 with eleven wickets on debut in 1924/25.
Grimmett and Mailey took 27 of the 41 English wickets to fall in 1926. Grimmett dominated by himself in 1930, with 29 victims. He then formed his famous partnership with the patron saint of Australian spin bowlers, Bill O’Reilly. The two of them took 53 of 71 English wickets in 1934.
Chinaman bowler Les ‘Chuck’ Fleetwood-Smith joined O’Reilly in Australia’s successful Ashes defences in 1936/37 and 1938.
Jack Iverson took up cricket at the age of 31, after he completed active service in World War Two. Four years later he was bowling for his country. He bowled like no man before him, with the ball gripped between the thumb and middle finger, a grip developed over decades of flicking a ping pong ball. He spun Australia to victory at Sydney to retain the Ashes in 1950/51, and took 21 wickets in the series. And then he retired.
Iverson, the subject of Gideon Haigh’s haunting, moving Mystery Spinner , one of the very finest of cricket biographies, had taken the cricket world by storm.
In 1958/59 new captain Richie Benaud led from the front, claiming 31 English scalps as Australia regained the Ashes. His twenty minute spell before tea on the final day at Old Trafford in 1961 ensured their retention.
Even the modestly credentialed leggie Peter Sleep won a Test for Australia in the otherwise dire Ashes summer of 1986/87.
Since 1993 Shane Warne and Stuart MacGill have claimed 234 wickets between them in Ashes Tests.
The great spinners – Grimmett, O’Reilly, Warne – attack and tie down the batsman at the same time.
The most recent Ashes Test, at the SCG in January 2007, was Warne’s last. The Australians repeated the feat of 1920/21, completing a five-nil whitewash.
Since then Australia has tried seven different spinners: Stuart MacGill (four Tests), Brad Hogg (three), Beau Casson (one), Cameron White (four), Jason Krejza (two), Nathan Hauritz (three) and Bryce McGain (one).
Twelve months ago Beau Casson was Australia’s incumbent Test spinner. He debuted in the Caribbean, took three wickets and has not registered on the selectors’ radar since. White, Krejza, Hauritz and McGain have all leapfrogged him into the Test team. He’s now had his Cricket Australia contract taken off him. When the Ashes series begins next month Casson will be running around in Darwin grade cricket.
What did he do wrong? We’ve never been told. The selectors are guilty of gross mistreatment of a talented young cricketer.
Bryce McGain was ranked our best spinner when the Australians toured South Africa. He suffered a horror Test debut, and has been cast aside.
Clarrie Grimmett, with only one Test under his belt, returned figures of 0 for 174 for South Australia against New South Wales prior to the selection of the 1926 Ashes tour squad. He still made the tour.
Grimmett did take eleven wickets in his Test debut. McGain took none. But Jason Krejza took twelve. That earned him just one more Test from Hilditch’s panel.
Spin bowling invites aggressive batting. Sometimes a spinner will cop a belting. Copping a belting is an occupational hazard.
There has been no consistency in this selection panel’s treatment of Australia’s spin bowlers.
Now Hauritz is the favoured one. A man with a strike rate of 95 in first class cricket, a containing off spinner suited to the middle overs of the limited overs game, will carry the torch once held by Grimmett and O’Reilly, Benaud and Warne.
Grimmett devoted himself to coaching the art of spin bowling. He wrote numerous coaching articles: “A bowler must live, think and practise aggression …. the bowler who employs negative tactics to keep runs down is wasting time.”
The current Australian selectors are utterly clueless when it comes to spin bowling.
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