England travel to India with three inexperienced spinners in their touring party. The tale of Ravi Patel, an England Lions bowler at 23 but out of the professional game at 27, is emblematic of the travails of the English spinner.
Tours of India can be the breaking or the making of a player. England’s two outstanding Test spinners of the 21st century, Monty Panesar and Graeme Swann, both debuted in India. But they can also be an international career-ender, or at least a career-staller. Take Dom Bess, for example, who at 26 is young enough to come again as an England cricketer, but started the previous India tour as England’s lead spinner, lasted one Test and hasn’t been seen since in Test cricket. From Martyn Ball and Richard Dawson in 2001, to Zafar Ansari and Gareth Batty in 2016, India tours tend to throw up surprising names, and as often as not, they aren’t seen again.
Former England captain Mike Gatting has warned that spin bowling is a “vanishing art” in English cricket, lamenting the lack of opportunities for young spinners to develop their skills. Eight years have passed since then. 2023 COUNTY HE Championship Key Wickets A quick look at his taker chart shows that little has changed in recent years. He is one of only five English spinners in Division One to take more than his 15 wickets, of which only Jack Leach and Tom Hartley are not considered true all-round options for him.
The life of a county game specialist spinner is unstable. Opportunities to establish yourself as a regular first-team player are hard to come by, but if you do get one, you’ll spend more than half the season without getting at least one call-up to the England Lions. Regularly. Take Josh de Caia for example. The Middlesex youngster started the summer of 2023 as a top-flight batsman and finished on tour with the Lions, a position he won solely through the development of his off-spin.
Ravi Patel is a man who knows all too well the ups and downs that English cricket brings to slow bowlers. Patel was a remarkable left-arm spinner who reached his peak at the age of 23, representing the mighty England Lions team alongside four future world champions, and who dismissed Virat Kohli at Lord’s, but was released by his home country at 27 I hit rock bottom when I was a year old. Middlesex. He made two first-class appearances after taking 12 wickets in the match. Despite boasting a bowling average of 31 in first-class cricket, he could not find a place elsewhere.
Patel’s story is a great example of the obstacles faced by young British spinners. Talent may be exciting, but even England’s best young spinners find it really difficult to get the number of overs they need to hone their skills. “It’s all about schedule,” says Patel, reflecting on his county career five years on from his last first-class game.
“I’ve been at Middlesex for nine years, and it’s been a long time since we’ve been able to finish a season well,” he recalled in 2012, when he joined the team for the final three games of the season. I am. In the final match of the season against Lancashire, he took a total of eight wickets, four in each innings, which helped him win the match and move up to third place.
“In other sports, like football, if you finish the season and you were the man of the match in the last game of last season, you’re going to be in the first game of the next season unless you sign someone. .” Your place.
“But then you won’t play, because the team needs a spinner who can hit eight and take slip catches. But you can’t do that.” So I said, “Well then, same thing. said it would happen every year. Five or six years later, I was like, “Wow! “Maybe we shouldn’t be here in April.” That doesn’t make sense. No matter what you did in the previous season. What you do for the season is completely meaningless depending on the conditions. ”
After winning the bronze medal in 2012, Patel did not play again until mid-July, in the ninth game of the season for Middlesex. A similar story happened in Patel’s penultimate season as a professional cricketer. In 2017, Patel played just eight matches across all formats, but won the second Eleven Championship, picking up wickets at 16.76 runs each. Middlesex started the final game of the season 16 points outside of the relegation zone, but were just below the table having prepared a pitch that capitalized on the strengths of the three-pronged spin attack of Jack Leach and Dom Bess. We played against a team from Somerset. and Roelof van der Merwe.
A tie was unlikely as he pitched “like it was day 8”. In fact, Middlesex had to win to survive. Patel, who has been out in the cold for most of the season, attracted attention.
“It was a crazy situation,” Patel says. “I was doing very well in the second team but I didn’t have any insight and couldn’t understand why. I hadn’t played all season so the club’s hopes of being relegated were limited to me. I am.
“The pressure was so high for me because of all the circumstances. It’s not like I established myself on the team – if I had a bad game, I said, ‘Okay, at least we can do this and that during the season. I did it.’ I didn’t do anything all season, I never had a chance, so now you throw me in!” I’ll never forget the day before this game. ”
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To further increase the pressure on Patel, he was the only Middlesex spinner selected in the starting eleven. After an understandably rocky start, Patel quickly found his rhythm. He led off Marcus Trescotdic with a “yard-turning” strike and then destroyed the Somerset batting lineup, posting a career-best record of 7-81. He followed up that drive with his second five-base hit in the second inning. Middlesex lost as their batting unit was suffocated by the stranglehold of Somerset’s spin trio, but Patel, who took 12 wickets in the match, did a more than adequate job.
This winter, Patel appeared in all three games between the South and the North at the Lions’ semi-extended camp in the Caribbean. He appeared in two more first-class games the following summer and was released at the end of the 2018 season. Patel never found another county and ceased to be active in professional sports for several weeks after his 27th birthday. A player who was considered talented enough to be included in the England national team selection in 2014 and 2018, he was banned from playing professionally.
Patel’s story is by no means unique. In 2015, ESPNcricinfo compiled a list of six of the most promising young spinners in the country, and Patel was among them. Of the other players on the list, only Danny Briggs came even remotely close to becoming a regular in last year’s County Championship. Adam Riley played his last first-class game at the age of 27, Zafar Ansari retired at the age of 25, while Matt Carter and Mason Crane have played almost exclusively white-ball cricket in recent years.
More recently, England took four under-24 spinners with them as part of the squad or as reserve players on the tour to India three years ago. All four competed for first-team opportunities in 2023. Bess, who was England’s top spinner in the summer of 2020, was sent out on loan twice mid-season to get some game minutes. Crane, on the other hand, has only played five first-class games in the past two seasons. Four of them came in mid-May or earlier. His teammate Matt Parkinson moved to Kent on a loan deal with Durham to play regularly in the first team after losing his place in the Lancashire side in early 2023. This is despite his first-class career record of 173 wickets at 25.85. When he stepped onto the park this summer, he performed well, taking 29 of his wickets.
The most dramatic drop is probably that of Amar Virdi, the fourth young spinner brought to India in 2021. In his teenage years, Virdy played an integral role in Surrey winning the 2018 County Championship, finishing the year with the most wickets in a year by an English spinner in Division One. He was a constant presence in the team’s winning campaigns. Five years later, Bildy hasn’t played a single game in either of Surrey’s last two championship wins, but he swept the second selection championship just like Patel did seven years ago. Surrey has managed to find a balanced team with little room for special variations. In 2023, spin bowlers took just 17 wickets in the Surrey County Championship. And if there are so few games in midsummer, when temperatures are at their highest, why do they stay away from summer?
The gap between being a realistic candidate for the England squad and fighting for a professional career is surprisingly small. Nottinghamshire’s Liam Patterson-White has been added to England’s reserve squad as a potential concussion replacement for the second half of England’s 2022 Test summer. In 2023, he was ruled out of Notts’ squad after five games (his last appearance was on May 22), before heading to a lengthy and spin-heavy Lions training camp at the start of winter. He also missed out on the right to participate. Looking around the country, Danny Briggs is the only specialist spinner over 30 who played regularly in the Championship last summer. He also has an uphill battle to stay in professional sports.
For Patel, it’s not just schedules that are making employment insecure for Britain’s young spinners. He criticizes the lack of specialist spin coaches and the lack of spin bowling development contracts. “Of course there has to be (a development contract for young spinners),” he says. “It makes sense. When they announced the latest deals, I thought, all these development deals are for fast bowlers, so why can’t they sign spinners too? You can’t expect to win in India, that’s not going to happen. ”
Hartley and Shoaib Bashir are two of England’s young spinners who have recently been selected from the edge of the county competition for the toughest tour. In the most anticipated trip for their spinners, England have set their sights on two bowlers who will start as second-choice slow bowlers in each county from the summer of 2024. Bashir said he wasn’t even in the first class county system 18 months ago.
You will definitely succeed. It’s clear what England are looking for in their spin bowlers when building this team, and the performances earlier this year of Australians Todd Murphy and Matthew Kunnemann (both inexperienced spinners) suggest they will It can serve as an inspiration for what might be possible to achieve. But when they succeed, it’s in spite of the structures surrounding them, not because of them.
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