PHIL WALKER
Wisden Cricket Monthly editor-inchief @Phil_Wisden
Spinners stick together, says Ian Salisbury, the former leg-spinner who was briefly and rather dimly billed as England’s answer to Shane Warne. “We’re natural survivors. We’re part of the brotherhood of spinners. We’re a union.” In England, where seamers dominate, spinners work in the shadows perfecting their lines, character actors to the box-office draws. It can be a rootless and psychologically taxing existence having to assert one’s worth all the time. “That’s why most spinners tend to get on,” says England’s latest experiment, Matt Parkinson. “It’s quite a lonely art.”