A parody and a true cricket tale

Over recent months, I have repeatedly sang this song (or variations) to my brother:

“Modern batsmen have a pitch
Ninety percent rigged
And on that pitch they score many runs
But deserve very few
With a cross-bat here
And a cross-bat there
Here a cross
There a cross
Everywhere a cross-bat
Modern batsmen have a pitch
Ninety percent rigged”

I have often thought of writing further lines about how covered pitches plainly constitute kangaroo courts for the spin bowler, but have never sung them.

Me and my brother have fiercely debated whether covered or uncovered pitches are fairer. The facts, at least judging from English first-class bowling data, firmly suggest covered pitches on average are more difficult for spin bowlers than even abnormally bad “sticky” wickets were for batsmen. Plainly put:

1. many batsmen managed to consistently cope with the most difficult uncovered pitches and achieve averages comparable to what the best batsmen under covering achieve
2. on covered pitches, zero spin bowlers achieve consistently anything like the same averages that old spin bowlers expected on uncovered pitches
• even overseas spinners — over most of history superior to English ones under unfavourable conditions — have never consistently come close to either the averages of the old spinners nor those of the best fast bowlers

My brother consistently says that with proper coaching spin bowlers can master covered pitches properly. He also said that the effort required to bowl spin effectively outside England was accepted there and ought to have been accepted in England. However, so early as the 1956 Wisden — when concern at the declining appeal of first-class cricket was becoming serious — it was noted that the emphatic finger spin needed outside England was the most difficult method of bowling to master, and fewer and fewer were developing it over easily mastered seam and pace. My brother also ignores how in many countries where “rollers” [a term used by Ashley Mallett in opposition to genuine “tweakers” in one 1996 Wisden article] were unable to turn the ball genuine finger spinners disappeared so completely as in England. This was especially true in the West Indies and South Africa, and suggests two things:

1. by 1960, the “tweaker” was already viewed as an extravagant luxury both in runs conceded and in cost of training.
1. John Woodcock would note in 1963 how the “tweaker” was already viewed too expensive in runs to compete against constantly improving fast and even medium-pace bowlers
2. it was undoubtedly clear, though never discussed, that improving the “tweaker” to be less costly in runs was constantly becoming less and less financially viable as pace bowling became better and better
2. development of spin bowling even partly able to cope with fundamentally rigged conditions is possible only under very restricted social conditions:
1. in pre-war Australia, leisure was sufficiently abundant that young boys had the time to develop the abnormal effort to develop “real finger spin” that might turn on fundamentally unfair pitches
2. in the Indian subcontinent, extreme abundance of labour means that young boys could be trained to develop genuine finger spin at relatively low cost vis-à-vis the rest of the cricket world

Hence, Clive Lloyd’s discovery, in Vic Marks’ word, that

“spin bowling was a luxury if four genuinely fast bowlers were available”

was entirely consistent with earlier captains’ experience over the past quarter-century as the extreme difficulty of bowling spin on well-prepared covered pitches became less and less affordable for young boys. The problem is that once spin bowling becomes viewed as an extravagant luxury first-class cricket is financially doomed in the long term, and its problems have been noted by Huw Turberville in his recent The Final Test. Virtually all historical instances where first-class cricket was economically self-supporting correlate practically perfectly with the greatest weaknesses in fast and medium-pace bowling, and exclusive reliance upon spin of whatever quality. Nonetheless, it is tempting to say that the greatest spin attacks in history — circa 1934 Australia and circa 1970 India — are fundamentally so costly to develop that first-class cricket becomes unprofitable once those costs are factored in, although attendance figures imply first-class cricket would always be profitable if the quantity and quality of spin developed in those two cases could be maintained. History shows that those standards of spin were never maintained, and the logical explanation is that maintaining the extreme effort involved in developing the bowlers was always too expensive and difficult. This further supports the contention that covered pitches are, fundamentally, rigged against the spinner incomparably more than uncovered pitches are against batsmen.