A lament for the spinners

A single and final Note from Headingley #5

“I’m telling you mate, one more over and I’d have had him.” Photo / Getty Images

It’s tempting to go straight in with knives sharpened and say the omission of Ajaz Patel from the third test against England was one of the most foolish selection blunders in New Zealand Cricket history.

It sounds good, it plays to a crowd baying for blood, but it wouldn’t actually be true.

It was, in hindsight, the wrong decision but one that made some sense at the time. It wasn’t so much the match-day decision that was dumb but a bunch of stuff in the year leading up to Leeds that caused it. We’ll get to that, but first the justifications.

• Patel is not good at batting¹. This is clearly not his primary role but if he was to have played at Headingley instead of Michael Bracewell, New Zealand would have effectively had four No10s taking positions eight to 11. With a top five out of form, that leaves two players to score all the runs. We used to have Dan Vettori at No8 - he bowled spin AND scored six test centuries - and this might have coloured our expectations. The horrendous shot Patel played in the second innings at Lord’s, when a few more runs could have swung the test, did not help his cause, although he was far from alone in that category.

• No matter which angle you hold the map of the world at, England is not Asia. Of Patel’s 43 test wickets, 39 have come on the subcontinent or the Middle East (more on those other four later).

• Michael Bracewell had a decent debut at Trent Bridge. In the first innings (3-62) he looked a little bit better than part time, but it was the second innings (0-60 off 8 overs) that should have been recognised as a cautionary tale.

• Colin de Grandhomme’s injury had tilted the balance of the team and with Daryl Mitchell not considered a genuine fourth-seamer option, something had to give.

Those are the justifications I can muster, but they shouldn’t have been enough to dominate the thinking when the first-day wicket was uncovered and revealed to be a lovely hashbrown colour and very, very dry. 

To be fair, Gary Stead and Kane Williamson have both conceded they got it wrong after watching England romp to seven-wicket victory in which Jonny Bairstow (71 not out) and Joe Root (86 not out) took great pleasure in skewering the unfortunate Bracewell (1-109 off 15.2 overs).

“Spin became as threatening [as pace] if not more,” Williamson said of the test. “It was a decision we made for the balance of the side. Ajaz is still obviously our No1 spinner and you look at that surface on day five and see the value of that.”

Patel was afforded two overs on this tour. In a three-test series where all New Zealand’s bowlers were torched at some point during the fourth innings of a test, the one specialist spinner was the only one who’s profligacy was deemed serious enough to pasture him; a strange situation when you consider he was an inch from bowling tormentor Ben Stokes, and that the last time he played on a wicket that sort of resembled Headingley, his match figures of 4-81 were useful in the defeat of England at Edgbaston (there are those non-Asian wickets I mentioned).

Analysing match decisions is good fodder. When the team you’ve spent a good chunk of your adult life watching has just lost a series 3-0 to a side they comprehensively outplayed 12 months ago, you want immediate answers to perplexing questions.

For me, the real question is how Stead and Williamson got to the point where leaving your best specialist out on a pitch that so obviously called for one was even up for discussion, let alone followed through on. And while this piece focuses on Patel, he’s really just the unwitting subject - it should be read more as a lament for spin bowlers.

Let’s go back to the Wankhede Stadium in December when Patel took all 10 wickets in an innings, just the third bowler in history to achieve the feat. His 14-wicket haul in the match was a bright spot in a bleak test. NZC “socialled” the hell out of it, as you’d expect given the added poignancy of him doing it in the city of his birth.

Patel’s confidence would have been through the roof. After years on the fringes, he surely would have felt as secure as he’d ever been within the national set-up. Instead he returned home and was immediately left out of the test squads to face Bangladesh and South Africa.

He wouldn’t be picked in the playing XI in New Zealand conditions - where he has combined bowling figures of 0-106 across five innings - so what was the point?

Aside from the wasted marketing opportunity of having Patel with the squad², there are troubling aspects to this decision that tell a bigger picture story.

Most of all, it is dogma. Just because something hasn’t happened in the recent past, it doesn’t mean it can’t in the future. As it turned out, it would have been very handy to have Patel in Mt Maunganui for that shock-horror first test against Bangladesh. Bangladeshi spinners took five wickets in the first innings, six for the test while Rachin Ravindra bowled 28 non-threatening overs. There was also a recent precedent, with Mitchell Santner, not in the same red-ball class as Patel, playing a key role in the victory on the same ground against Pakistan a year earlier. If Patel’s in the squad at least, you can make decisions on the fly - absolute greentop at the Basin, don’t play him³; a bit brown and tacky at the Mount, he’s in.

Second, it is defeatist. Looking at Patel’s lack of wickets in tests on home soil doesn’t allow for the fact good players learn and adjust. In three of Patel’s five wicketless home returns he bowled three overs. The most overs he’s had in an innings in New Zealand is 28 and he went for 46 runs, so although a scalp would have been affirming, it was not like the game was getting away from him. On test-match wickets in New Zealand, left-arm spinners have to make adjustments to get good players out - they can’t just bowl tightly and look to hit the front pad with an arm ball every few overs. Patel has never been given the chance to make those adjustments and hone them.

It is selective. Look at the treatment afforded Patel compared to Matt Henry. Like Patel, Henry doesn’t fit the age profile of an up-and-comer and he can’t bat that well, yet he is frequently in and around the squad, even if he doesn’t make the playing XI. At one point, Henry literally had some of the worst stats, in terms of average, of any bowler that had played at least 10 tests. Team management, however, took the view that Henry would figure it out, that his luck would change, that he would repay the faith. He wasn’t given three overs in an innings to make an impression then jettisoned to wide mid-on. Lo and behold, Henry has started to make good on time and effort invested in him. What they’ve done with Henry is the right thing: identify a good player and retain the faith in him to work it out even when pundits are calling for his head. The other thing, however, is that Henry offers nothing much more than what is already in place. Patel is a genuine point of difference, yet has not been afforded the same amount of patience.

It is shortsighted. Although Patel would probably never admit to being frustrated, I’m sure he is and I’m also sure that his frustration is shared among those who practice the craft in New Zealand domestic conditions. They see the lack of encouragement given to long-form spinners, so who could blame them for concentrating on being white-ball darters like Mitchell Santner and Cole McConchie. If you’re a young talent like Adithya Ashok, are you looking at the landscape and thinking there’s a real opening for me in red-ball cricket, or should I concentrate on the short, money-making form?

This is an imperfect lament in many respects.

I’m not armed with the mountains of data that the coaching staff pore over before every test. Nor is Patel by any means the perfect spinner condemned by an imperfect system. If he was Ravi Ashwin, for example, he would play far more often.

Patel might be by some distance the best red-ball spinner in the country, but he has limitations. Not as many limitations as Jack Leach, however, who just won man of the match in Leeds, but limitations nonetheless.

But how do you develop spinners, reduce those limitations and extend the scope of their influence beyond Bunsen-burners on the subcontinent unless you’re prepared to let them fail like you let seamers fail? How are you going to make spinners even feel like a valued part of the New Zealand game if you’re going to prefer part-timers from Wellington with first-class bowling averages of 49 (Bracewell) and 56 (Ravindra) because they might add a few runs down the order.

They’re questions New Zealand Cricket’s high-performance team need to find answers to if they want to be a competitive team in all conditions. Either that or it’s time to call Vettori out of retirement.

1. Not that this applied to Headingley, but Kyle Jamieson’s rapid deterioration as a batter - the 2.03m bowler has shown to be incapable of dealing with bouncers - and has lengthened the tail by one, increasing the attractiveness of a batting spinner.

2. No suggestion Stead should make selections according to marketers’ wishlists, although there was at least one high-ranking official at Mt Maunganui bemoaning Patel’s absence for non-playing reasons.

3. FWIW, I agreed with the decision not to play a spinner against India in the WTC final at Southampton.