England's spin drain is a problem of their own making

If the first two Ashes Tests were defined by England’s self-inflicted wounds – bad decisions with the bat and wild spells with the ball at crucial moments – the third has shown just how big the gulf is between them and Australia. With Usman Khawaja, Josh Hazlewood, Pat Cummins and Nathan Lyon winning two caps between them at Perth and Brisbane, the gaps were there for England to exploit. At Adelaide, even as Australia donated wickets regularly on the first day, there has been no such opportunity.

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England’s inconsistency with the ball meant that Australia were still able to post a competitive total in the first innings. Then, as the hosts’ five-man attack combined to deliver a metronomic, even mesmeric flat-pitch bowling performance, that score began to look gargantuan. England’s early day three resistance didn’t get them back into the game, it just prolonged the pain. With Australia effectively 85-1 early in their innings, perhaps the most optimistic England fan still had hope flickering. It was extinguished not by a flood, but by a flow, runs streaming untroubled from the bats of Travis Head, Khawaja, and Alex Carey.

Nowhere is that distance between the two teams wider than in the spin department. The bulk of that stress-free pile-on came off the bowling of Will Jacks, who bowled 19 overs for 107 runs. In the first innings, it was 105 conceded in 20. Only once in the history of Test cricket has a bowler bowled as many overs in a game with a higher economy rate (South Africa’s Jimmy Sinclair in 1902, if you were wondering). Contrast that to Nathan Lyon, whose second-day spell of 0-19 in 10 overs showed his class just as much as his two early wickets did. Australia have a pressure cooker. England have a release valve.

There was never, of course, any expectation that Jacks could compare to Lyon as a bowler. And if you squint, you can see the components of a useful Test operator. Though he has made his name on the franchise circuit, he is not your trademark modern-day T20 spinner. He bowls slowly and puts action on the ball. While a shake of the head after Khawaja nicked behind revealed that he had been fortunate to see the long-hop strike, his two wickets on the first day were in part the product of dip, Khawaja and Carey getting too far under attempted big shots.

Jacks offered marginally more threat than Joe Root, not in the form of genuine chances, but of the oohs and aahs of thick inside edges or jabbed prods that a finger-spinner must sometimes make do with in Australia. But it was Root who contained marginally better, his round-arm deliveries giving Head a fraught wait for a second century of the series on 99. Most damning was that Australia didn’t need or try to hit Jacks out of the attack. Khawaja’s three boundaries off Jacks were all reactive sweeps to balls pushed down the leg-side. And even if you remove the 50 runs scored in boundaries, Jacks still conceded more than three runs an over.

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The question really is, how did England get to this point, and what more could have been done to prevent it? Plan A was to ‘hot-house’ Shoaib Bashir, in accepted parlance, who they see as the only English spinner, in theory, with the tools to take genuine first-innings wickets in Australia, at his best.

As that plan hit speedbumps, Bashir regressing after a positive start and then suffering from injury at a key moment, England looked for a plan B. Reasoning that, after Bashir, all finger-spinners have their utility limited to run containment, and that the difference between conceding, say three runs per over and 4.5 runs per over is mitigated by the runs on offer from No.8, they opted for Jacks over Liam Dawson and Jack Leach, with Jacks being an off-spinner to challenge Australia’s four left-handers also at play.

Bashir's back-ups have been poorly planned

That’s the argument. But you can pick holes in both conception and execution. All else being equal, had Leach or Dawson gone at 3.5 runs per over in the Adelaide Test, England would be 75 runs better off than they are with Jacks in the side. That’s a lot of runs to make up with the bat. And, if Jacks was the Bashir back-up plan, why has he featured so little in England’s Test set-up until now?

He performed creditably in England’s whitewash of Pakistan in 2022, but wasn’t included in a squad between that winter and this one. He wasn’t picked for their tour of India at the start of 2024, nor of Pakistan later that year, and, when Bashir got injured last summer, England opted to pick Dawson and then, effectively, Jacob Bethell as their spinner while Jacks was playing for Surrey in the County Championship. Being called in from the cold to play in the Ashes cauldron is enough to give any player chilblains, but for Jacks, short on first-class experience due to franchise commitments, it’s especially troubling.

The other option available to England was Rehan Ahmed, who averaged north of 50 with the bat and under 20 with the ball as Leicestershire secured their first ever County Championship promotion. It’s possible to quibble with those numbers slightly. Bowling in the second division bears little resemblance to Australia’s Test attack, and there are still murmurs over Rehan’s game against the proper quicks, with his back leg jutting out rather than staying aligned. That bowling average was produced by just 23 wickets, Leicestershire limiting their star man’s workload early in the season, largely using him to mop up the tail.

Equally, the historic nature of his high watermark illustrates the scale of the talent: a century and 13 wickets against Derbyshire with the Kookaburra marked the first time an Englishman had achieved that double since Ian Botham. While all five of his Tests have come in the subcontinent, a return of 22 wickets at 31, including a five-for on debut, demonstrates a bowler with potential. In hindsight, perhaps it is he, not Bashir, who England should have been aiming to accelerate for Ashes readiness.

There’s also the suspicion that, in Australia, wrist-spin might just be more effective than leg-spin. The big boundaries can make aggression risky, with sliders and flippers aided by the extra bounce on offer. The lack of other assistance from the pitch means that only a bowler properly ripping it can hope for sideways movement. Beyond Shane Warne and Stuart MacGill, there are recent examples of wrist-spinners succeeding in Australia. Sri Lanka’s Upul Chandana claimed 12 of his 37 Test wickets in Australia, including his country’s best figures in the country. Pakistan’s Danish Kaneria claimed three five-fors in five Tests down under, and India’s Anil Kumble four in 10. Kuldeep Yadav sealed the first series victory by an Asian side in Australia with a spell of incisive left-arm wrist-spin.

It’s a time-honoured tradition, after English winters, to lament the state of slow bowling in the country, as England are torn apart by opposition twirlers while their own toil for little reward. The difference this time is they had several attractive if imperfect options to choose from. It appears they backed the wrong two.

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