5 minute read
“I hate doing it,” claimed Steve Smith at the toss. “But as I’ve said, we keep producing wickets that we don’t think is going to spin.” As it turned out, the more accurate assessment came from Ben Stokes. “We try and act like we know what we’re doing when we’re looking down at the pitch and rubbing it and, you know, knocking it. No one really has a clue.”
This was the first time in 138 years that Australia had gone into a Sydney Test without a spin bowler, but it was also the fourth time in six matches they’ve done without one.
Fortunately for them, and unfortunately for anyone following the series, Australia have been up against an England team who haven’t picked a spinner even once.
Will Jacks, you say? Will Jacks is willing and not incompetent, but he is not a spin bowler; he is a cricketer who sometimes bowls spin.
Jacks’ spin has taken fewer first-class wickets than Dawid Malan’s spin – and at a worse average too. No-one called Dawid Malan a spin bowler.
One of the least helpful things to happen to England this series was when Jacks and Stokes put on 96 runs in the second Test defeat in Brisbane. This pointless pride-salvaging rearguard convinced the tourists that the quasi-all-rounder was somehow cumulatively worth a place in their XI based on his batting and bowling combined.
Test cricket doesn’t work like that. We said at the time the ‘promise’ of that innings of 41 would have a ‘false’ inserted before it with the benefit of greater hindsight. And so it proved.
When has your eighth best batter ever swung a Test for you? It was pure wishful thinking to imagine a man with Jacks’ career record would make meaningful runs when those ahead of him couldn’t. You could say something similar of his bowling.
In Test cricket, right now, Jacks is a buyer of wickets and a scorer of meaningless consolation runs. He finished the series with 145 runs at 20.71 and six wickets at 53.66. He conceded 4.9 runs an over – more than any England bowler bar poor Matt Potts.
To contextualise that, Potts was sentenced to just the one nightmare innings on a flat pitch having not played competitive cricket since September – and he was massively out of form even back then. That was the kind of level Jacks was operating at.
It wasn’t a series for spinners, of course. but given that in three of the matches Jacks was the closest thing to a spinner on either side, such an assessment became more than a little self-fulfilling.
“You kind of get pushed into a corner in a way,” explained Smith before the Sydney Test. “So that’s the way we’ve gone.”
As it was, Beau Webster took 3-64 in England’s second innings, bowling spin. Those wickets included Jacks, who went out of his way to slog his second ball to Cameron Green in the deep.
Like Jacks, Webster is not a spin bowler, but a cricketer who sometimes bowls spin. It’s not even his first-choice bowling style any more to the extent he consciously avoids practising it because he thinks doing so only makes him worse.
“I don’t think I’d be standing here if I was still wheeling out the offspinners,” he said when he was given his Test debut last year.
You can take that two ways. You can say that someone who doesn’t even practise spin bowling can successfully function as your spinner, or you can say, shit, what would an actual, proper, spin bowler have done to the opposition on that pitch?
Smith himself is very strong against spin and he was also in decent nick having made 138 in the first innings when Will Jacks clean bowled him through the gate after turning one two foot.
Never one to camouflage his feelings, Smith was left literally open-mouthed by what had happened. Holding his position, he turned to double-check where the ball had come from, as if someone had rotated the SCG around him just before ball was released.
The ball hadn’t merely beaten Smith. He’d missed it by the full width of a bat.
“We keep producing wickets that we don’t think is going to spin.”
But enough is enough. If that’s what you think, maybe you should start thinking differently. Not just Smith. Maybe they should all start thinking differently.
As Stokes said, “No-one really has a clue. You can only try and give yourself the best chance of getting the XI needed to get a chance of winning.”
And if you don’t have a clue, maybe start by furnishing yourself with all the options – don’t just pay lip service to one of them by picking some dilettante.
Australia won, so was their selection justified? “It is now,” answered Smith. “We’re standing here winning, right? Had we not, there’s maybe a bit to answer for there, potentially.”
So what of the team standing there losing? By the exact same rationale, England’s team selection – shaped by their squad selection before the tour even began – was presumably dead wrong.
Sometimes you reverse into a corner of your own volition.
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