Bat and ball / Andrew Hughes / 15 December 2009 /

Graeme Swann may be the best spinner in England, but he barely makes the top ten internationally. Andrew Hughes looks at the decline of English spin bowling and asks what can be done to reverse it.

Graeme Swann came out of nowhere to grab the number one spinner slot and he's loving every minute of it. The irrepressible interviewee and notorious Twitterer has leap-frogged Monty Panesar in the spin-bowling queue and is one of the first names scribbled down when Andys Strauss and Flower are writing out the team sheet. And even though South Africa is not usually a happy place for spinners, a quick look at the market for top England wicket taker in the upcoming series finds Swann third in the betting [5.2]

A gifted youngster, he got his first chance with England team back in 1999. But he famously failed to impress coach Duncan Fletcher and soon found himself dumped back in the county wilderness. That might have been the end of his international dream. But he never quite gave up and through hard work and a desire to keep getting better, he has forced his way back. It took strength of character to do that in a country where spinners get short shrift. Make no mistake; Swann has come through despite the system.

Yet for all the entertainment he has given us (particularly the ball that castled Ricky Ponting at Edgbaston) the brutal truth is that Swann does not figure in the top five international spinners playing today. Would he sneak into the top ten? Perhaps. Just. And you could say the same about those who went before. Panesar, Ashley Giles and Philip Tufnell had their moments. But they could never put the fear of god into the opposition in the way that a Muralitharan or a Warne or a Harbhajan does.

Why should this be? It isn't as if England has no spin tradition. Some of the world's finest twirlers and tweakers have learned their trade in Blighty. It's just that you have to go back an awfully long way to find them. 'Deadly' Derek Underwood was perhaps the last of the greats. Before him, there was the sixties duo Jim Laker and Tony Lock. Dig a little deeper into the archives and you come across such fine craftsmen as Hedley Verity and the mighty Wilfred Rhodes, bowlers who seemed to have the cricket ball on a piece of a string, such was their mastery of flight and spin.

But spin bowling is a fragile skill and a young spinner needs time and space to perfect it. Our damp climate means that you are never likely to see the kind of dry bouncy pitches that encourage Australian leg spinners or the dusty crumbly tracks of the subcontinent. So how did young spinners ever get a game? Well, until 1980, England was the home of the 'sticky dog', a strip of rained-on turf that had started to dry out. In such conditions, the English finger spinner was unplayable. Every team needed two in their side. The young spinner had security of selection.

But from 1980 onwards, pitches in county cricket were covered. The 'sticky dog' became extinct and the attacking spinner was on the way out. Some sides played an extra seamer, some dropped their spinners altogether. The role of the spinner changed too. Their new job was to keep one end tight, to trundle away with the old ball while the quicker blokes got a breather. Captains lost the art of managing the spinner as a weapon and young twirlers were whipped out of the attack the moment they started to leak runs.

So what can be done to reverse the trend? Uncovered pitches are unlikely to be considered. But there are measures that the ECB could take. They are already penalising counties who don't pick enough young players. So why not tweak the rules further. Counties who want to employ a spinner usually look abroad. Mushtaq Mohammed, Saqlain Mushtaq, Harbhajan Singh, Imran Tahir, Shane Warne, Murali Karthik and Paul Harris have all done their time on the county treadmill recently, but this has meant opportunities for English-qualified spinners are rare. The ECB should rule that a county's overseas spot cannot be taken up by a spinner, ensuring that youngsters will get a chance of first team cricket and the steady decline of the English spinner might just be halted.

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