6 minute read
It’s confirmed then. England have put themselves in a position to lose the Ashes without ever once playing the spinner they fast tracked into the team at least partly because they thought he could perform well in Australia. With no great career record and no real form to speak of, you can see why England might not have much faith in Shoaib Bashir right now. It’s a bit odd though given the faith of Ben Stokes has been his Test career’s single greatest buoyancy aid this whole time.
The preparation
Have you ever watched The Rehearsal?
Most of the biggest laughs in The Rehearsal come from the sheer scale of the extraordinary painstaking effort Nathan Fielder has put into the setup. Unlike some, Fielder is very definitely not a man who believes you can prepare too much. That is, in fact, the central premise of the show.
In the first episode, Fielder builds a full size replica of a Brooklyn bar called the Alligator Lounge so that a guy can better rehearse confessing a minor lie to his pub quiz teammates.
In the second series, he builds a partial replica of the George Bush Intercontinental Airport terminal and staffs it with actors, so that pilots can roleplay interactions with colleagues. His goal is to ensure first officers are sufficiently assertive to challenge their captains should they find themselves in a potential crash situation.
For related reasons, Fielder later attempts to replicate the personality of Sully Sullenberger – the pilot who famously saved all his passengers by landing in the Hudson River – by putting himself through a series of simulations of Sully’s life. Quite unforgettably, these simulations begin when Sullenberger was a baby…
While there are often noble intentions somewhere in the mix, it’s always funniest when you feel like he’s gone to these extraordinary and elaborate lengths simply to make a joke.
Similarly, you have to admire the long setup for England’s 2025/26 Ashes campaign with regards to spin.
Jack Leach
Four years ago, the England Test team run by Joe Root and Chris Silverwood was not big on picking spinners and even less big on picking their best one: Jack Leach.
Despite this, they did actually play him in the first Ashes Test and he got a walloping. England responded by dropping him for the second Test in favour of a five-man right-arm fast-medium attack that immediately conceded 473-9.
It didn’t really matter what they did by then though because the work to undermine Leach’s confidence had been completed long before. By that point, he’d been left out in the name of team balance so many times he’d surely come to believe he was made of osmium.
We wrote about this in an article titled ‘Root and Silverwood have the Jack Leach that they created’.
Here it is:
A year or so later, after a warmly encouraging change in the style of man management, we wrote a contrasting follow-up piece, titled ‘Stokes and McCullum have the Jack Leach they created’.
Here it is:
Where the previous management team had omitted Leach every chance they got – generally in favour of no spinner at all – Ben Stokes and Brendon McCullum picked him by default.
But not just that. Stokes backed him in the field too. He gave him plenty of overs and even asked him to open the bowling at Headingley on one occasion. No longer was Leach’s spin bowling the option of last resort, it was clearly a valued tool in its own right.
When Leach later slipped down the pecking order, it was chiefly due to injury: a stress fracture and then a knee injury. But this only served to give Stokes an opportunity to burnish his reputation as a captain you’d really want to play under if you were a spinner.
Tom Hartley
Leach’s final match as England’s first-choice spinner was probably the first Test against India in Hyderabad last year, when he suffered the knee injury. England actually played three spinners in that match, one of whom was Tom Hartley.
Opening the bowling in India’s first innings, Hartley’s first ball in Test cricket sailed over the ropes for six. A ball or two later, another one went and after three overs, he’d conceded 34.
Actions speak louder than words. In 2013, Alastair Cook’s actions told Simon Kerrigan that after two overs he didn’t trust him and the young spinner never really recovered. In 2024, Stokes’s actions told Hartley that he did trust him. He kept him on for a nine-over spell.
“Stokesy and Baz, they really got around me,” said Hartley afterwards, having finished that first innings with 2-130 off 25 overs. “I lost no confidence and was able to come out and do my best out here.”
In the second innings, Hartley’s best translated into a match-winning 7-62.
Shoaib Bashir
Since that tour, England’s premier spinner has been Shoaib Bashir. Plucked from basically nowhere, in large part because the England captain liked what he saw, he has shown admirable grit in taking 68 Test wickets, including four five-fors.
That he remained first choice even after Leach had recovered was a big vote of confidence in itself given the backing Leach had been given. According to Nathan Lyon, having spoken to James Anderson, Bashir retained this status at least partly because England felt he could replicate what Lyon himself does in Australia.
So Bashir arrived for this Ashes tour with those qualities in mind and as the first-choice pick for an England captain with a properly decent track record of meaningfully backing his spinners.
And then they just never picked him. When push came to shove, they didn’t back him.
As we said at the outset, given his career record and the form he’s shown on tour, Bashir’s omission is understandable, but looking back to Root, Silverwood and Leach, we’re also struck by how little distance we’ve covered. Yet again, England just don’t quite trust their main spinner in Australia, so they’re instead taking what they see as a safer option.
How did we get here?
Was the goal all along to identify and develop exactly the kind of spin bowler where no-one would complain too much if you left him out?
We’re being flippant there, but if it’s a colossal and unexpected loss of form, why is there no-one else in the squad to step in? Will Jacks is a good cricketer, but his one wicket in the second Test was only his 50th in first-class cricket – Leach has taken more than 10 times as many. No matter how he actually bowls, Jacks is a “this is a peripheral job almost anyone could do” selection.
If we had to identify when things went astray, we’d be tempted to go for Liam Dawson’s selection for the fourth Test against India at Old Trafford a few months ago. In overlooking Leach (who had a central contract at the time), this was the moment when England stopped picking their best spin bowler and so implicitly downgraded the value of spin bowling as a whole. Since then, we’ve been back to the spin bowler as optional luxury.
For all the talk of batting intent and hitting Australia with fast bowling and all that bollocks, this feels like the area where Stokes and McCullum have blinked. As the Ashes hoved into view, they moved away from the perceived risks of specialist spin and towards the comfort blanket of seam bowling and batters who bowl. This is doubly galling given that Stokes is probably the best England captain of spin bowlers we’ve seen for all the reasons given above.
In summary
After near enough four years of rehearsals as a Test team that values spin and backs its spinners, it’s off to Adelaide, where temperatures are forecast to hit 39C and Nathan Lyon is the top wicket-taker of all time… with no spinner.
If nothing else, you’ve got to admire the extravagant and painstaking effort that’s gone into setting up that punchline.
ATTENTION! You can still get The 50 Most Ridiculous Ashes Moments in time for Christmas (AND SHOULD!)
Our Ashes book, co-written with Dan Liebke, counting down the 50 most ridiculous Ashes moments of the last 50 years is very much available and honestly a very good Christmas present even from an unbiased point of view.
These places have it in stock:
- Bookshop.org – dispatches “immediately” and they say it’ll arrive in time
- Amazon – Amazon deliveries are a mystery to us, but we’re sure you can get it in time from there too