It is a major season in the making for Jack Leach, England’s lead spinner. All the more so if the captain Ben Stokes can hardly bowl against Australia, having taken two Test wickets last winter.
Leach will have to hold an end for long periods if Stokes cannot bowl. Leach’s counterpart, Nathan Lyon, has no great record in England – 45 Test wickets at 31 – but he has always been tidy, going for fewer than three runs per over, and allowing Australia’s fast bowlers to refresh.
In his first outing of this season Leach took four wickets – all in Warwickshire’s top five – for 119 runs. In a cold wind he dropped a bit too short at times, but overall he found some early-season rhythm in his 29 overs.
England’s leading wicket-taker of last winter was not James Anderson or Stuart Broad, let alone Stokes, but Leach. Five Tests and 25 wickets for the left-arm spinner, which gave him a Test record of 120 wickets at 34 each. In an ever-changing world we have come to rely on Leach’s steadiness.
Leach may not bowl in Bazball style but, by the time he came on for the 15th over of Warwickshire’s innings, he had already contributed to Somerset’s tail-wagging first innings, scoring an unbeaten 27 off only 35 balls to take his side up to 284.
All too soon however Leach was to find that the pitch had dried out into something slow and placid. It made for a vivid illustration of why bowling spin in April is a hopeless task for any apprentice, and taxing even for an established Test spinner.
The pitch was so slow that, provided the ball was not a yorker, the batsman had time to play back and middle it. If the batsmen has time to adjust after being deceived, spin bowling is a different game from the one enjoyed by the two Ravis, Ashwin and Jadeja, in India.
Why do championship matches have to be staged on pitches which have not been used earlier in the season, or even pre-season? They would offer some wear and tear, some natural variation, so the batsman might be punished for a misjudgment. Grass is left on the pitch for the seamer, so why not wear and tear for the spinner? The “pristine surface” is an overrated fashion.
Another local difficulty: Leach had to bowl from the River Tone end irrespective of the wind and any other factors. The grass in front of the new stand at the other end has died, and the boundary brought in 10 yards, as if it were not too short for spinners already.
Leach, therefore, was left with batsman-error to exploit. He took a wicket in only his second over of the season when Will Rhodes mistimed a pull-drive to mid-on, but Alex Davies settled in with Sam Hain, who both made centuries.
Davies, after his punchy hundred, missed his first attempt at a reverse-sweep at Leach and was bowled behind his legs. In the same over Dan Mousley played back artlessly and was pinned in the crease, some turn at last. On the final morning Hain was caught behind by James Rew.
Spinners were no more prominent in the other games in the championship’s opening round. At Southampton the number of wickets taken by spinners, as Hampshire beat Nottinghamshire, was one, by Liam Dawson. Yet before 1960 one-half of championship wickets were taken by spinners.
Steady, always steady, is “good old Jack” as the Taunton faithful term him. Old-time spinners could be nervous, but for any in the white-ball era, resilience is the most valuable asset.
Of England’s left-arm spinners in the last half-century who have taken 100 Test wickets, Phil Tufnell was his own man as a flighter rather than a spinner. Leach has to be rated above Ashley Giles, but not the equal of Phil Edmonds or Monty Panesar, yet his statistics are much the same.
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