A fault in my understanding of Woodcock

In three recent posts, I have looked

1. firstly at the death of John Woodcock, whose writings in the 1985 and 1986 Wisden Notes by the Editor pushed me into a long-standing obsession with old county cricket
2. secondly at the views I acquired from my initial reading in the early to middle 1990s,
3. thirdly at how these have evolved as I have read more about old county cricket in older Wisdens and The Times

My brother, from whom I acquired the original 1985 Wisden, has always been somewhat critical of what I said ever since I first became obsessed with Woodcock’s 1985 Notes by the Editor. However, it has only been in the past few years, especially since the COVID pandemic has restricted me to reading online from the SLV and newspapers.com websites, that I have listened at all to my brother’s criticism.

Starting at the earliest writings of Woodcock, it is striking that his Times criticisms of the declining amount of spin bowling, which can be read on the first post in this series, do not appear related to the most rapid declines in the amount of spin bowled. In 1955, seventeen spinners were amongst 27 takers of 100 or more wickets. Five spinners in Tony Lock, Johnny Wardle, George Tribe, Bruce Dooland, and Fred Titmus took over 150 wickets, with Lock, Wardle, Titmus and Tribe being the four top wicket-takers with over 175. Three seasons later in 1958, there were only five spinners — Lock, Jim Laker, Tribe, Brian Langford and Cecil Cook – amongst eighteen bowlers with 100 wickets. By 1962 there were only four spinners — Titmus with 136 wickets, Ray Illingworth with 117, Don Shepherd with 114 and Lock with 108 — amongst 23 bowlers who took 100 wickets. Three pace bowlers in Derek Shackleton, Fred Truman and Len Coldwell took at least fifteen more wickets than Titmus, and five more pacemen took more wickets than Illingworth. Nevertheless, 1962 issues of The Times and The Guardian contain zero lamentations about declining spin bowling, although an aware cricket historian could have easily seen the replacement of spin bowling by short-of-a-length seam as an important cause of rapidly deteriorating county finances. Contrariwise, the following year’s Times issues contained many such lamentations, two of which I attached to the first post in this series.

All this begs a question: why did The Times start lamenting declining spin bowling in 1963, and not 1962, 1961, 1960, 1959 or 1958? Those seasons already exhibited the same decline in spin bowling Woodcock lamented in 1963 and continuously for a third of a century afterwards. The answer, my brother and I concluded, was that declining spin bowling was not the true concern of Woodcock, Norman Preston, Evelyn Wellings and other English cricket writers of the era. Rather, English cricket writers of the last third of the twentieth century were concerned that England was not winning. During the Thatcher era, the prospects of England regaining supremacy in the cricket world appeared dimmer and dimmer with each passing year, while the ruling class was deeply nostalgic for the days when England did rule the roost. The ruling class viewed England beating non-white nations as the order dictated by natural law, and abundant spin bowling became seen as the missing ingredient. Declining spin bowling thus became an excuse to explain England’s failure to match the West Indies in the middle 1960s, and most international opponents in the 1980s and 1990s. In reality, after World War Two spin bowling was never decisive in actual England series victories over India, Pakistan or the West Indies. Nevertheless, under the above presumption that a greatly reduced quantity of spin bowling in England constituted the critical difference, it paid for Wisden writers to lament the decline in spin as much as possible, and to imagine — if not explicitly, — that ancient spin bowlers could have broken the West Indies’ apparent invincibility because no 1980s team was exposed to anything beyond third-class spin bowling, and that on pitches rigged against the spinner.