Consistent failure and consistent silence

Probably the most striking and most consistent feature of cricket history — at least since the middle 1890s — has been the failure of English spin bowlers in Australia. This is especially true given their dominance of first-class bowling records.

Since Bobby Peel and Johnny Briggs in the late 1880s and early 1890s — as will be noted, a wholly unsuitable comparison — no English spin bowler has ever been a matchwinner at Test level in Australia. The universal failure of the most successful county bowlers like Tich Freeman, Wilfrid Rhodes, Colin Blythe, Eric Hollies, Frank Woolley or Richard Tyldesley, plus the fact that an even greater number of extremely successful county bowlers like Charlie Parker, Tom Goddard, George Dennett, Walter Mead, Schofield Haigh, Albert Hallam and Razor Smith were never remotely considered for a tour of Australia, is chilling. Even the less unsuccessful English spinners — Roy Kilner, Jack White, Hedley Verity, Jim Laker, Fred Titmus, Derek Underwood — were never able to win Tests like they consistently won county matches at home. What these relative successes could do was contain batsmen over extremely long spells, a critical skill in the conditions of Test cricket in Australia at the time.

Statistics demonstrate the abysmal record of English spinners in Australia:

1. since 1905, only twice has an English spinner taken ten wickets in a Test in Australia
1. out of more than forty occurrences in all Ashes Tests
2. and many more than that elsewhere in international cricket
2. no English spinner had taken so many as 26 wickets in a series in Australia since 1903/1904
1. whereas as of 1998 (a quarter of a century ago!) this had occurred more than seventy times in all Test cricket

Both 1903/1904, when Rhodes took thirty-one wickets in five Tests, and the success of Peel and Briggs between 1886 and 1895, reflect abnormal climatic conditions. 1886 to 1894 was the wettest era in the instrumental record in eastern Australia, and in Melbourne 1903/1904 was the wettest and second-coolest summer since records began in 1856. The wet conditions produced pitches much less unfavourable to spin.

What is equally striking, analysing both Wisden and the English and Australian presses, is the complete absence until the 1950s of discussion about English spinners’ abysmal record in Australia. Whenever discussing whom to choose for an Australian tour the failure of English spin was not discussed. Nor was the question ever asked after the most unsuccessful Ashes tours like 1907/1908, 1920/1921, 1924/1925 and 1946/1947. The Australian press was almost equally silent, although it might be expected to have more idea why English spinners were so hopeless. The fact that Australia produced an exceptional number of high-class spinners in this very period constitutes the proof Australian pitches were not impossible for spin bowling.

Two obvious reasons are:

1. the sport-watching public possessed negligible interest in understanding why English spin bowling so consistently failed in Australia
2. because of the large number of first-class teams in England, bowlers much better suited to Australian pitches always existed, making the universal failure of English spin into a non-issue

However, I have recently thought that a more important reason for the silence at least of Wisden and the English press may be that at a very early point — following Colin Blythe’s complete failure in 1907/1908 — it became accepted that failure of English spinners in Australia was a law of nature and that expecting them to win matches as they did in England was tantamount to tampering with nature. Belief that either:

1. English spinners could never be trained or coached to emulate their English successes in Australia because their special skills were specific to English conditions and entirely useless in Australia, or
2. the cost of making English spinners as effective in Australia as at home would be prohibitive in one or more of:
1. labour
2. time
3. their value at home via either
• reduced success in English conditions
• loss of the art of spin via adopting medium pace in Australia, as Bobby Peel and Freddie Brown did

fits perfectly with the silence about the abysmal record of English spin in Australia. Belief that English spinners could never be effective in Australia (under normal climatic conditions) would explain why the 1911/1912 and 1920/1921 teams included no player for spin alone, and the surprise of Wisden at the objectively modest but comparatively exceptional success of Jack White in 1928/1929.

When England’s writers became nostalgic for predominant spin bowling in the 1960s, foreign writers occasionally discussed English spinners’ woeful record in Australia, if without the vehemence with which Wisden writers criticised current English cricket, and rarely quoting the striking figures noted at the beginning of this post. It is likely that writers in Australia and the West Indies viewed even the very best English spinners as mediocre-to-bad bowlers unimportant to the broader history of cricket. (This, even if accurate, meant they failed to dissect their weaknesses). English writers, for their part, were tied between their nostalgia for prominent spin bowling and the plain fact that English spinners had been matchwinners in Test cricket only at home, and there only before covering was adopted in 1959. In both cases the presumed perspective was highly unfavourable to dissecting and analysing why England could not produce spin bowlers capable of sustained success in Tests under Australian conditions.