Whither the spinner's art in cricket?

By A.C. de Silva

THE DECLINE OF SPIN BOWLING... It is one of the features of the times that the cricketers at most places with the possible exception of the West Indies, bemoan the decline of spin bowling at the higher levels of the game. Over-rates in Test matches have fallen alarmingly, variety has been lost and the charm of game has been reduced because spinners play a shrinking part in it.

And yet every now and then, as if to remind us of what we've been missing, spin takes complete charge after Hirwani at Madras sometime ago, Qadir at Lahore a couple of months previously followed by Sri Lanka's Muttiah Muralitharan, most of the time the bowling has been handled by the quicker men with probably the exception of Sri Lankan new-found spinner Rangana Herath - the left arm spinner.

Sadly, though there are exceptional cases. Nearly all of the time it's quicker men these days who perform the deceive bowling roles in Test cricket.

There are the restoration efforts that have been made in the late 1980s but there are numerous questions being made about the decline of spin bowling, where questions are rarely asked and therefore almost never addressed.

When did it begin? How far has it gone? Is it still going? The answers to these questions are important, because they will throw-light on the reasons for the decline and the scale of the problem to be faced if spin is to be restored to its traditional place in the game.

And nearly everybody, these days, believes that some restoration is necessary.

Workload declines

When we examine the spinners' shares of the wicket hauls, a rather different picture emerges. Before World War II, spin bowlers took the wickets in proportion to the amount of bowling they did. Since 1945, though, this has been less and less true and the spinners' wicket share has fallen-steadily at first, but more rapidly in recent times. In the 1980s, in fact spin bowlers have done a third of the bowling to capture only slightly more than a quarter of the wickets.

Clearly there has been a diminution of the efficiency of spin bowling as far as the capturing of wickets is concerned. This is true in the absolute sense (spinners, overall, strike less frequently and take their wickets at a higher cost in runs than they used to) and relative to the faster bowlers in general, the latter strike more often than of old, and other wickets appear to be marginally less expensive now than in the past. The improvement is not, it should be noted, universal, but neither is it a function attached to the varied of high-quality fast bowlers in West Indian teams of recent times.

Widening gap

The general trend, then, is one in which spinners are becoming less effective while faster bowlers become more so.

This has been evident for some time, but the tendency has been especially strong of late in the 1980s the gap between the two groups is enormous world while, on average, spinners' wickets has cost 25 per cent more in this decade than wickets taken by faster men and spin bowlers have sent down 44 per cent more deliveries per wicket captured than have the medium-paced and quicker bowlers.

During the inter-war period, by contrast, the two broad types of bowler were virtually indistinguishable in terms of average and striking rates.

Negative factors

Defence is obviously a vital part of the game, but in the cast of spin bowling it sometimes seems that it has over-ridden attack almost completely. All too often in modern Test Cricket the task of spin are to rest the quicker men and to hold the fort when the wicket is placid and the batsmen are on top. It is hardly surprising that spinners bowling averages have deteriorated, especially since pitches heavier bats, fertilised outfields and longer-lasting seams on cricket balls have all countered against the spinners - not to mention one-day cricket.

All this, of course, is by way of generalisation - which means that is not equally true everywhere or all the time. In Pakistan and India spin remains an important attacking weapons, as it does on occasions elsewhere. But the overall trends are nonetheless inescapable and they lead to a melancholy conclusion.

Spin bowling, its role reduced in both scale and scope, is in danger of becoming incidental to the major thrust of the game - as it already has in teams representing the West Indies.

Figures tell clear story

In this decade, Test selectors everywhere pick fewer accredited spinners than they used to. On average there are only 1.5 per team nowadays, as against 2.0 during the seventies and between 2.2 and 2.4 in earlier periods. Wrist spinning especially, have all but disappeared, yet it is they, not the finger-spinners, who tend to be the occasional match winners.

The figures tell a clear story. The decline in the use of spin at Test level is surprisingly recent - taking Test cricket as a whole, most of the fall has occurred since 1979 - but the reduction in the effectiveness of spin bowling as an attacking weapon is of longer duration. No doubt the recent sharp decline in the utilisation of spin is in part a delayed response to the diminution of its wicket-taking ability.

The worst of all this, it must be said, is that there is no sign, except in India and Pakistan, that the trend away from spin bowling has run its course.

And that raises some awkward possibilities too. What if spinners should continue to experience a decline in their effectiveness as wicket-takers? Would their efficiency in the run-saving role be enough to save their positions in Test teams? It must, surely, be doubtful.