For India this was unremarkable yet invigorating, another series victory at home but with a collection of fresh faces. There were the two at the finish line in Ranchi: Dhruv Jurel, 23, two games in with the gloves and already a headliner; Shubman Gill, 24, still rectifying a middling Test record while classily ensconcing himself at No 3.
Then there is the 22-year-old Yashasvi Jaiswal, who is averaging a touch under 70, has the remarkable Maidan-made origin story and raises his arms like Jude Bellingham because he knows he also has it all. These boys, bred on Indian Premier League glitz, can also dead-bat it like grandpa said to.
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As Jurel hit the winning runs, there was a reminder these are salad days for a few on the other side. A few yards away was the 24-year-old Tom Hartley and moments before it had been Shoaib Bashir twirling in, only 20.
It has been said elsewhere, but let’s go again: it is remarkable how we got here, with these two uncapped before the tour and selected on something close to a hunch. Hartley will enter the final match of the series as its leading wicket-taker, while Bashir, with 12 in two matches, has more first-class wickets for England than Somerset.
Suddenly, it is all about what comes next for these two, how their development could stall when they return to county cricket, where there are few guarantees for a spinner. Hartley will go back to Lancashire, where he will have to bow down to Nathan Lyon, while Bashir faces a shootout at Taunton with his pal Jack Leach.
Brendon McCullum’s recent consternation – “It will be a slight frustration of ours if they weren’t given opportunities at county level” – demonstrates that both are part of the future. Even with a lack of game time, England will be unperturbed when it comes to selecting them, gut feeling having served them pretty well on this tour.
The whole thing is discombobulating. Three years ago, England departed India 3-1 down, prompting the postmortem on their spin problem: they could not play it, they could not bowl it. A coterie of young spinners selected for that tour – Dom Bess in the main setup, with Amar Virdi, Mason Crane and Matt Parkinson in the reserves – have barely had a look-in with England since and had their struggles in the counties too.
This time around the scoreline could end up worse but with the junior spinners, Rehan Ahmed included, ending up as the feelgood story of a first series defeat in two years.
Ben Stokes is the obvious man to thank, the guy who gets the slow stuff, combining wholesome-dad empathy with tactical nous, ending a run of England captains who did not really know what to do with something that requires, more than anything, a little bit of love. At times the affection has possibly gone too far, with Bashir given a 31-over spell on the second day in Ranchi when it was clear he would have plenty more work to do come India’s chase.
The talk now turns to which spinner gets the one-man job for the summer. Leach has played every Test under the current regime when fit, but that has become a rarity, with the left-arm spinner having missed eight of England’s past nine games, his Ashes ruined by a back stress fracture, the tour of India by a knee injury.
To cast him off would be silly, though. Leach has come back from a fractured skull, remodelled his action, been picked, dropped, picked, dropped and then some more, contracted sepsis, been brutalised by Rishabh Pant and Travis Head and somehow, in the middle of all that, taken 126 Test wickets.
Hartley has a ripping delivery past the right-hander’s outside edge when it all clicks, a bit of chutzpah with the bat and, as proved on debut, the ability to quickly heal from a Jaiswal mauling. Watching Bashir it is best to go to the words of Jack Black’s Mr S from Richard Linklater’s 2003 masterpiece School of Rock: “You’ve got it. I don’t even know what it is, but you got it.” It is the teenager Ahmed who has the highest ceiling of them all, with an obvious strut that makes him ideal for Stokes’s England.
All three have had star turns in their Test careers but, having featured exclusively in the subcontinent, remain raw. The challenge at home as the lone spinner is to be the bowling attack’s goalkeeper. Stay covert while others do most of the work, nail the boring stuff and win the game when required. It is a different sort of pressure to working in India, but pressure nonetheless. A fully functioning Leach remains the safest option to turn back to, but they do not really do safe nowadays.
With Leach crocked and Ahmed back home for personal reasons, Dharamsala offers another opportunity for Bashir and Hartley. The weather forecast suggests it will not be far off an early-season county offering so, beyond the obvious allure of a tighter 3-2 scoreline, both have a chance to show what they can do in conditions closer to home.
And then who knows? After thriving for their country, they may even get a game with their counties.
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