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”.