Today new writer Dan Booth, from the TopBinsBlog, looks at the options behind Adil Rashid in England’s T20 line-up. Is the cupboard really that bare?
In eleven months’ time, the England cricket team will arrive in India for the T20 World Cup. The aim? To go one better than 2016 and bring home a second limited-overs World Cup within just over two years. However, the chance of doing this may rest upon addressing their big issue – spin bowling depth.
Adil Rashid is a star in the shortest form. To say anything more would risk muddying the very simple fact that England have one of the premier limited overs spinners in their team. But has his brilliance led to the headache of over-reliance? It’s a problem that I’ve coined ‘spindividualism’. England have come to a point where all their spin hopes rest with Rashid.
At this point you may ask, ‘but what’s wrong with just having one really good player?’. This is of course a totally fine strategy. I simply fear it could fall apart if Rashid gets injured or England encounter a turning surface that they simply can’t exploit sufficiently with one slow bowler.
So what are England’s options?
Bat Deep (Mooen or Liam Livingstone)
English cricket loves nothing more than a bit of bat-deep. So why not look at two spin options who bat really well?
Moeen has bowled just one over in 6 of his last 7 T20Is (one over in each, not cumulatively) but he’s a known quantity with great experience.
However, a sexier pick In line with the team’s ‘knock them all over the place’ philosophy would be big hitter Liam Livingstone. Having averaged a six every 11.04 balls in the recent Big Bash|09, it shouldn’t be forgotten that Livingstone can also turn the ball both ways – rare attribute in English cricket.
The concept of including one of these two is that it allows you to have spin on the table if the situation calls for it, but it doesn’t harm the batting order one bit. But then again, if the pitch is turning, surely you want the best pure spinner available?
Bat Even Deeper (Root or Denly)
The Joe Bros. The Dynamic Duo. What if England wanted to bat REALLY deep and brought in one of these two? The rationale is the same for the previous category but this time taken to extremes.
Joe Root is obviously a top class batsman that can also provide a bit of useful off-spin. For reference, look at that wonderful Test in South Africa this year where he picked up four wickets, or maybe even the previous T20 World Cup Final where he picked up two scalps in a single over.
Denly can also bowl. He delivers some gorgeous leggies. You only have to search his name on Twitter to see some effusive praise for his spin. All jokes aside, Denly showed his use down the order in the third T20 this summer against Australia with a robust 29* (19). A strike rate of 152.63 is nothing to disregard quickly.
Truthfully, I don’t see this one coming to fruition. The likeliest chance is that Joe Root regains his spot and bowls a few token overs.
Spin To Win (Matt Parkinson or Liam Dawson)
The other main option is simply to put another frontline spinner on the pitch and back the batting order above them to do enough.
Often I see people reasoning that Parkinson would struggle in England’s team due to his less than stellar batting. But who cares? If Roy, Bairstow, Buttler, Stokes, Malan, Morgan etc can’t score enough runs then something has already gone seriously wrong. Let the spinners worry about spinning.
I fully acknowledge that Parkinson and Dawson are at slightly different stages of their career. Dawson has been the perennial nearly man, making the World Cup squad in 2019 but not playing a single game. Whereas Parkinson is currently the almost man – almost breaking into the team but not quite having a foot in the door yet.
The rationale for discussing these two is that they’re recognised bowlers. They’re probably the best we’ve got – save for Adil Rashid wearing a disguise, calling himself Radil Aashid, and attempting to bowl another four overs.
My main worry here is that England might have left it too late to accommodate someone new. To move to a two-spinner attack might take a little bit of getting used to, and we only have a year before the World Cup. If England want to spin to win, they’d best get a move on.
The Likely Lads (Will Jacks or Mason Crane)
‘You’ll never win anything with kids.’ A phrase that has a prized place in the halls of sporting infamy. Maybe it’s time that England proved it wrong for the umpteenth time.
Mason Crane divides opinion but it could be time to give him another chance. After having the simultaneously enviable and unenviable task of debuting down under, Crane has not featured since. But after a more than solid summer with Hampshire, Crane could soon find himself knocking on the door again.
An even younger prospect is Mr Will Jacks. After tearing through the T20 Blast with 309 runs, 13 wickets, and an MVP award, there might be something to be really excited about here. Having signed recently for Hobart Hurricanes, Jacks could soon make his case as a shock inclusion even stronger.
Of the two, I see more of a chance for Jacks. This is down to his undeniable talent with the bat.
The Final Analysis
Realistically, England will probably do the predictable thing and select Moeen Ali as their secondary spin option. Mo is well-liked and trusted within the camp and England are usually keen to have him involved.
However, the hopeless romantic in me would go for either Jacks and/or Parkinson. Maybe it’s just my love of putting faith in the next generation, but I do truly see them as being able to make a great material contribution.
Let me know what you think in the comments.
Dan Booth
I think England can well afford to carry one non batting spinner (Parkinson), and I would like to see Jacks given his chance as well. If Parkinson finds himself required to bat then his betters in that department have royally mucked things up.
I’m sure that they will go with Moeen. None of the other spinners you mention have persuasive credentials. Dom Bess (bats as well as bowls) would seem a better option than any of those. Please not Mason Crane or Liam Dawson!
…whoever you play as a bowler in Twenty20 is likely to go all over the park, so you might as well play bowlers who can bat as well. On his day, Moeen Ali is the best of these.
Why not Crane or Dawson in T20? In tests I completely agree, but both have fairly good one-day records…
There’s a bounty of young spinners in County cricket, any one of which could be ‘given a go’ ahead of the T20 World Cup. While Adil Rashid is a show-in and Joe Root (if selected) can turn the ball effectively, do we dare give Moeen Ali another chance. His batting of late has been awful and his lack of confidence with the bat has had an adverse effect on his bowling. No longer can we rely on him to produce four tidy overs, pick up the odd wicket and then belt a quick 30. So who do you look to? Certainly not Bess or Denly. Dawson is okay with the ball and good with the bat (for a bowler). Parkinson started his international career well but fell away and was, like so many before him, ignored by the all-powerful,Morgan. As an aside, I would be taking Willey and not Topley to India but he seems to have fallen foul of the egocentric Morgan. Other options include Jake Lintoff, Danny Briggs and Daniel Moriarty, all of whom applied themselves with some success during this season’s Blast. But as they’re not in South Africa with the rest of the squad, they’ve obviously domne something to offend the seemingly precious Morgan, and so we are falling back on the tried and tested, os in a few cases – the tried, tested and failed.
Whilst I agree that Morgan can be like that–ask Alex Hales!–this rant seems somewhat paranoid. James gives some possible reasons why Parkinson wasn’t picked; it’s also worth pointing put that whatever “prejudice” Morgan has about him, it seems to be shared by the red-ball hierarchy (and to some extent Glen Chapple)…so it may also come from the coaching staff.
Willey may have fallen foul of Morgan but it may equally be that they think Topley (who is also four years younger) has a better chance of bowling right through an innings than Willey and/or be better suited to conditions where there is less swing.
As for Lintott and Moriarty–could it just possibly also be that one is a young player who hadn’t played a professional game in any format until four months ago (ie he’s pretty raw), and the other is a 27-year-old who until this season had played four games of professional cricket (ie his good 2020 Blast season might be the start of something big but could equally be a flash in the pan). But no–they’ve “obviously” offended Morgan. Obviously.
I’d love it to be Parkinson but my money’s on Mo!
Some say Parkinson bowls too slow which is a disadvantage in 4/5 day cricket but in white ball games, especially on a big field, it can be helpful…. And he holds his nerve when he gets whacked. Worth a go for me but the all powerful Morgan might not agree.
Good point. Rashid also bowls slowly. He’s proven you can be successful in international T20. Whether England want two similar spinners, however, is another matter. Would it be too easy for the batsmen to line them up? My gut tells me that they may want someone who bowls a little quicker and flatter (and predominantly spins it the other way) for variation.
Based on the premise that it’s easier to succeed in white ball as a batsman, where the pitches are less responsive for bowlers and by definition more difficult to make an impact as a bowler it’s logical to go with experience on this front. There’s no spinner pulling up trees in any form of the game in this country at the moment, so better the devil you know. Moin can bowl to a field and Morgan knows what fields to set for him. In 20-20 all you need is someone who can bowl 4 overs with reasonable accuracy and let the batsman take the risks. Our batting is so strong at the moment that it puts enormous pressure on the opposition to take those risks.
Parkinson or Jacks for me. A specialist or a young player. If neither of these two, then Root is probably the next best/least worse choice – but I’d rather see him concentrate on Test cricket to lengthen his career.
Mm, yes, let’s debate the merits of Mason Crane or whether this Indian pace attack is the greatest in the world (you know, the one that’s just been carted to every corner of the SCG and taken hours about it) – but is anyone noticing that there’s a new chairman at the ICC?
Hardly worth mentioning, is it? Certainly none of the UK corporate media have. The guy has started off by saying that for him there’s no Big Three (so he’s a bare-faced liar) and that the international schedule is unsustainable so must be fundamentally reviewed (sound ominous?…. ). He wants the USA to host ICC events which I’ve been arguing is where they’ve been wanting to go for years.
Mis-direction is an old trick. It’s why you’re debating whether Maradona’s cheating prevents him being a great rather than how you’re going to pay your share of the £27bn of forthcoming tax hikes and whether Tunbridge Wells should or shouldn’t be in Tier 3 rather than why there are any tiers at all.
Amazing isn’t it?–a cricket website discussing how an international team based in the same country as the website might fill one of the few places up for grabs in a World Cup team eleven months before the WC, at the time that the team is actually playing a series. Shock horror, hold the front page, cricket website discusses…cricket!
But trying to edge round the elephant of paranoia and conspiracy theory into the room of your argument…Barclay’s issue with the schedule (and he also said he had no firm opinion on the most contentious piece of detail in it, which is whether to schedule more ICC events) was to balance commercial and cricketing/player welfare objectives more than they have been recently. That sounds fine to me as a general principle. Of course it could mean all sorts of things in practice, but that’s happening anyway for commercial reasons, driven by the players: if even the BCCI can’t stop one of their star players missing a Big Three all-format series because he’d rather play in the IPL when he’s half-fit, then what hope do the selectors of West indies, New Zealand or Bangladesh have?
As for the USA–I’m not at all a fan of expansion for the sake of expansion (the I in ICC does after all stand now for international rather than imperial!), but being overly luddite about it also doesn’t really work, especially if the sport goes bankrupt. (Worth noting that that would have the effect of making it even more financially dependent on the Big One than it is now, so for that reason alone, trying to get into untapped markets seems like a good idea).
Of all the untapped markets (and for God’s sake it’s better than the ICC’s big idea of ten years ago of expanding into China!), the USA makes the most sense to me. That’s mainly because it has a huge expat community of people who come from countries where cricket is culturally established–and cultural connections rather than blue-sky expansionist theories a la Sanjay Patel are how cricket has expanded into virtually all of its new members–and it apparently has the fourth largest viewing market in the world (ie bigger than any of the Full Members outside the Big Three). Why wouldn’t you?