Is Wisden consistent in what it calls “fair”?

Over recent weeks, my brother has argued that uncovered pitches, even in the Enriched nations of England and New Zealand, are inherently less fair than covered pitches because they are capable of producing conditions excessively favourable to spin bowlers. My brother and mother have said that these conditions bred spin bowlers who could not adapt to the cast-iron wickets that prevailed on the ancient soils of Australia.

The late David Green in his early 2000s ‘Back to Grass Roots’, contrariwise, argued that covered pitches given spin bowlers so little opportunity that they stereotype the game — eliminating opportunities for many men who otherwise would have a chance of a successful career. Green’s argument to me is very reasonable for reasons I may have discussed elsewhere on this blog, but which would be off-topic to discuss here.

One significant observation is that before widespread covering — not to mention limited overs cricket — made conditions excessively tough for spin bowlers, England did possess one ground where spin bowlers struggled just as much as they do on today’s covered pitches. In the immediate post-World War Two years, when the proportion of overs bowled by spinners peaked, Trent Bridge was an outstanding exception. Whilst almost every other county team relied upon attacking spinners who — although even in England hopeless against the Australian batsmen with the footwork and power to smash ball after ball — drew huge crowds, Nottinghamshire relied largely upon the medium-fast seam of the injury-prone but classy Harold Butler and the more robust though less skilled Arthur Jepson. Spin bowlers who were successful at almost all other venues in England were typically hopeless at Trent Bridge.

In this era, Wisden was quite clear that the pitches at Trent Bridge were far less fair than pitches at other grounds in England. The almanac judged them as excessively unfair to bowlers in general, not merely to spinners. However, by the logic of my mother and brother, the Trent Bridge pitches would have to be considered fairer than those at other venues, especially as they were difficult for pacemen as well as spinners, whereas David Green, Mike Selvey and others lamenting the decline of spin bowling often noted how easy 1980s and 1990s English pitches were for pace and seam. My mother and brother were clear that the Australian pitches upon which almost every old English spin bowler failed completely were actually fairer than English pitches of the era, because they were much less likely to give spin bowlers extreme assistance.

To assess this question, we must note that in the very era when English spinners were most consistently failing in Australia, Australia itself produced numerous outstanding spin bowlers. Harold Hordern, Bert Ironmonger, Arthur Mailey, Clarrie Grimmett, Bill O‘Reilly and Leslie Fleetwood-Smith constitute a set of spin bowlers seldom equalled by any country over a comparable span. Contrariwise, Nottinghamshire as of 1950 — when Wisden was at its most vocal about the Trent Bridge pitches — had not provided a significant spin bowler since Sam Staples three decades previously. Indeed, even relative to the drastically diminished wicket hauls attained by spin bowlers since covering was increased in 1959, there has not been a significant spin bowler hailing from Nottinghamshire ever since. Every one of Nottinghamshire’s most successful spin bowlers since Staples retired in 1933 — Bruce Dooland, Gamini Goonesena, Bryan Wells, Eddie Hemmings — was an import recruited with a substantial reputation. So were lesser lights like Ken Smales, Michael Morgan, Robert White and Harry Latchman. By the end of the 1990s, England, as Green noted, had the same complete incapacity to produce and develop spin bowlers Nottinghamshire did at mid-century. This, as Green noted, really does point to modern pitches being quite unfairly rigged against the spinner.

From another angle, old Wisdens never said interwar Australian pitches were unfair even though the English spin bowlers who could adapt to them can be counted on one hand. More deeply, Wisden could be said to maintain a clear contrast between nature and nurture. The radically different Australian soils — four-and-half orders of magnitude older than English soils — mean that it is natural that English bowlers would struggle to cope because grass and soil fauna interact in completely different ways and consequently the way in which they bind is naturally radically different. Contrariwise, the mid-century Trent Bridge pitches, and modern covered pitches throughout England, reflect artificially prepared surfaces that have the effect of producing conditions that must be called rigged against spin bowlers.

Thus, what David Green was effectively saying in the early 2000s is very consistent with what Wisden had said about Trent Bridge pitches half a century previously. It is also more consistent than many other issues the almanac has had to cover over a long period.

What should have been the first covering ban

Throughout Wisdens between 1985 and 2001, the editorials outcry covered pitches as destroying the virtuosity found in earlier English batting, and greatly reducing the amount of spin bowling. As a teenager in the early 1990s, I was attracted powerfully by the match and season wicket hauls seen in older English cricket, which reached up to three times what the top English bowlers were taking when I discovered them. Wisden, and consequently myself, assumed that the primary reason was that the older bowlers were vastly more skilled, with skills outside of containment being lost with the advent of one-day cricket, although I was already aware that pitches had become more unfavourable to spin bowlers with the advent of covering.

With the 1998 Wisden’s ‘Woodcock’s Hundred’ and David Green’s 2002 ‘Back to Grass Roots’, it became clear to me that the old English spin bowlers who took huge wicket hauls were not as good as previously presumed — or at all events, unlikely to have been more successful than what spinners remained then. Although Green was too tactful to say so, he demonstrated that modern covered pitches were unquestionably rigged against spin bowlers, whilst Woodcock’s list of the 100 greatest cricketers of all time included only three of the thirteen bowlers with over 2,500 first-class wickets, and all of these largely for their batting. It occurred to me that almost every old English spin bowler was hopeless on Australian pitches — the number who were even relatively as successful in Australia can be counted on one hand.

However, Green’s point — which I accepted — that batting techniques had further deteriorated from those Woodcock lamented in 1985 made me believe uncovered pitches must produce far superior technique. As early as the 1956 Ashes tour, Bruce Harris on page 20 of his Defending the Ashes: 1956 said that

“Maybe it will help if, for a change, the Australians allowed the “gentle dew from heaven” to drop upon the place beneath, even when that place is a cricket pitch”

Harris’ call for uncovering on page 20 of this book was two years too early. If he had seen the 1958 New Zealand tour he would (ought to!) have made a far more rigorous call for complete abolition of covering 

Undoubtedly, Harris wrote two years prematurely. In 1958, New Zealand averaged an abysmal 12.49 runs per wicket in five Tests, with Tony Lock averaging 7.47 runs per wicket. At the same time, the Kiwis were so atrociously weak in spin bowling that in the Third and Fifth Tests, they failed totally to exploit favourable conditions. Since soils in New Zealand are much closer to soils in England than to soils in Australia, and New Zealand pitches are in no way physically dangerous after rain, ever since reading Defending the Ashes: 1956 I have felt that Harris, or anyone who wrote a book on that 1958 tour, should have taken a rigid stand against any and all pitch covering in New Zealand.

From a modern perspective, New Zealand stood a few years ahead of the English curve. Domestic New Zealand cricket at that time was dominated by short-of-a-length medium pace bowlers under largely covered pitches and lush, heavily fertilised outfields that were increasingly unfavourable to spinners. This meant that New Zealand’s batsmen gained absolutely none of the skill required to handle quality spin under less unfavourable conditions. The situation of New Zealand in 1958 reminds me a great deal of English cricket thirty years later: conditions made for easily mastered medium-pace seam bowling but which precluded developing skill against speed or especially spin of reasonable class. Completely and uncompromisingly eliminating covering (except perhaps pitch ends) both before and during matches would undoubtedly have made it easier for New Zealand to develop spin bowlers, who should have improved the public appeal of cricket and possibly the team’s abysmal batting.

From another angle, if England had seriously asked about the 1958 New Zealand team questions like:

1. why did they fare so much worse than on their previous 1949 tour?
2. why had their batting been so inept against spin over the previous half-decade?
3. why did they have zero spin bowling of their own to exploit favorable pitches?
4. what in New Zealand domestic cricket and society was making decent batsmen and spinners impossible to develop?
   

the English could potentially have learned more than from any other touring team in history. England in 1958 was beginning to do exactly what New Zealand had been doing for some few years previously:

1. creating lush outfields and overgrassed pitches
2. increasing covering of pitches
   
3. seeing a dramatic reduction in attendance-attracting spin bowling
4. reducing the skill of their batsmen

The results, whether from the 1958 New Zealanders or the 1989 England team, are highly instructive: teams that, to paraphrase Kyle Wright, “were bad and were boring”.

The “immigration gap” in settler nations

Today, discussing the fate of the VFL’s “soccer belt” problem children in 1960s — South Melbourne, North Melbourne, Footscray and Fitzroy —one thing occurred to me whilst I was discussing with my brother and a former Penleigh friend the southern and eastern European immigration that eroded those clubs’ supporter bases. I had long presumed this post-World War II migration wave to be largely driven by migrants fleeing Stalinism, although a large proportion was from non-Stalinist Greece and Italy.

An oddity is that, whilst there was large-scale migration from:

1. the northern Stalinist nations of the Baltic States, Poland, the former Czechoslovakia, and Hungary and
   
2. the Balkan nations of the former Yugoslavia, Greece and Albania

there was, at least before Stalinism collapsed, very little or no migration from the intermediate nations of Romania and Bulgaria. My brother agreed with me on this — he knew people from Greece, Yugoslavia and the countries listed in (1), but no one of Bulgarian ancestry and only one person of Romanian ancestry. Looking at Wikipedia, although the figures are substantially distorted by migration since the collapse of Stalinism, one does see how small the Romanian and Bulgarian diasporas in Australia remain.

A similar situation prevails on the opposite shore of the Black Sea. There is virtually no (Stalinist-era or earlier) Georgian diaspora in Australia or other colonial settler nations, but large Armenian diasporas.

This interesting fact my brother suggested to be because it was easier to emigrate from Yugoslavia and Greece than from Stalinist nations more closely connected to Russia. However, as we discussed, that makes little sense because Enver Hoxha’s Albania was much harder to migrate from than Russia-allied Stalinist countries, yet still saw significant migration.

What my brother did point out was that the lack of pre-existing communities may have prevented immigration from Romania, Bulgaria and Georgia. This is  of course logical, but it does not explain how these immigrant communities developed in the first place. A quite convincing argument, more than the first two, is that Romania, Bulgaria and Georgia had more flat land and thus fewer people were pushed from the land by land reform or farm consolidation than in the Balkans or Armenia. Although they possessed even more flat land than Romania, Bulgaria or Georgia, the more northerly Stalinist nations’ peoples  established populations in the settler states during the late nineteenth century, which created opportunities for further immigration due to the existence of communities with familiar food and culture.