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.