ENGLAND IN INDIA
Beyond the spin
England’s new spinners were derided as no-hopers when they arrived in India. But between them they showed glimpses of a positive and progressive future, and not just with the ball
BY PHIL WALKER
The final analysis will read India 4-1 England, and soon the details will fade and the scoreline will come to look much like the rest. Except this wasn’t quite like the others. The sense of spiralling inevitability wasn’t anywhere near as pronounced. With an hour to run of the fourth Test the series was still alive, the chasms between the two teams having looked more unbridgeable on paper than in the middle, and with this faintly absurd fact no more in evidence than in the case of the spinners.
In the home corner: R Ashwin and Ravindra Jadeja, the greatest spin twins of the century. And alongside them, just for kicks, a left-arm leggie who after 12 Tests has a strike rate of a wicket every 37 balls, the best since the 1890s.
All of this against a team with three of its four frontline spinners able to summon a single Test cap between them and three five-wicket hauls across the entirety of their red-ball careers. The only one with any experience, incidentally, would play one Test, get injured, and leave the tour.
Yet for much of the series England’s kids stood up, and often even matched, India’s spinners. At certain moments, all three of them looked like Test cricketers. Lancashire’s clubbable scouser, Tom Hartley, went first – and whatever happens from now, whether he outmuscles Jack Leach to become a useful spinner-cum-No.9 or falls in behind his club’s big-time signing Nathan Lyon, he will always have Hyderabad, scene of a dream debut and England’s great heist, albeit now destined to carry an asterisk marked with the words: What might have been.
Hartley would have other moments. But as the series wore on, two other spinners emerged, blinking into the light. And as they did so, these spunky British-Asian lads growing a bit taller with each new spell, it became ever harder to disassociate the dignity of what they were doing for their country from the filth and fury spewing daily from the gutters of its political class.