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New Zealand’s Mark Craig is the latest in a long line of foreign spinners to flounder in Australian conditions. Their main problem? A lack of overspin on their deliveries.
In Australia, if a slow bowler doesn’t get the ball to both drop sharply on the batsman and kick up at them off the pitch, they will be cannon fodder. And they can’t achieve this without imparting heavy overspin on their deliveries, like Nathan Lyon and, to a greater degree, the legendary Shane Warne.
Bowling with a significant amount of side spin makes sense on most overseas decks. Why? Because they are softer and so offer not only greater turn, but also more natural variation in bounce and sideways movement.
When Australia were flogged by Pakistan in the UAE last year, Zulfiqar Babar got wicket after wicket with straight deliveries. Commentators at times incorrectly dubbed them arm balls. In fact, side-by-side replays of Babar’s deliveries showed identical balls – with the same seam position and seemingly equal revolutions – reacting from the pitch in vastly different ways.
One would turn and bounce sharply, beating the bat, clipping its edge or rapping the batsman’s glove. The other would skid on with the arm.
Because of the turning deliveries, the batsman often was playing for the movement when they encountered the straight ones and promptly perished. Australian after Australian was dismissed by these skidding balls either bowled, lbw, or caught in close off the inside edge.
Bowling with heavy sidespin like Babar works on softer decks because of not only the sharp turn that can be gained, something which is not on offer in Australia, but also because of the much more inconsistent bounce offered by the deck.
In that two-Test series, Babar snatched 14 wickets despite essentially just bowling the same delivery over and over again. Rarely did he use significant changes in pace or angle of delivery.
Babar just bowled around the wicket, angling in at Australia’s right handers, and landed the same delivery on the same spot constantly until the surface eventually reacted in a manner the Australian batsmen didn’t expect.
Now, the batsmen contributed to the success of his strategy by failing to make him change his length either by advancing or using the full depth of the crease, as I outlined at length in this piece at the time.
But were Babar to replicate his approach on Australian pitches I would wager that he would be hammered and milked, in equal proportions, by the home batsmen.
Why? Because his deliveries would react off the pitch in an almost identical manner, there would be no random variations in turn and bounce. Thus the batsmen could predict confidently what each delivery would do and react to them in a positive manner.
In Australia, spinners rarely beat batsmen off the pitch with sharp turn or natural variation. It is bounce and flight which are their weapons, and these can only be produced as a result of hard overspin.
Even the greatest foreign spinners of the modern era have struggled in Australia, and more often than not it’s because they couldn’t get the ball to dip or bounce alarmingly.
It long has been remarked in the subcontinent, India in particular, that the biggest mistake visiting spinners make is bowling too slow. The dry Asian decks typically are so responsive to spin that you needn’t bowl slowly like on Australian decks, where lowering your pace often is crucial to achieving turn.
On Asian pitches you will normally turn the ball regardless, so it’s wise to bowl quicker so the batsmen have less time to react and adjust their strokes. Even Warne struggled to adapt to this, although it must be said that increasing your delivery speed is many times harder for a wrist spinner than a finger tweaker.
The same way so many visiting spinners are not nearly as effective as the home tweakers on Asian pitches, foreign slow bowlers constantly flounder in Australia. Finger spinners, in particular, battle for effectiveness Down Under.
This is because not only do they naturally get less revolutions on the ball than wrist spinners, but it’s also easier to spin over the top of the ball with a wrist spinner’s action.
Craig is in good company – Muttiah Muralitharan, Graeme Swan, Saeed Ajmal and Harbahajan Singh are the four greatest off spinners of the modern era. Yet all four of them were utterly pedestrian in Australia. Combined they played 18 Tests here, taking just 45 wickets at the sky-high average of 66.
As wily and talented as that quartet was, none of them managed to acclimatise. The missing ingredient was overspin.
I flagged in my preview of the New Zealand Test team that Craig’s style of bowling would likely be ineffective on firm Australian pitches.
“The inexperienced tweaker does not get nearly as many revolutions on the ball as Nathan Lyon and bowls with more side spin than his Australian counterpart,” I wrote. “The second of these issues will be key as the success of finger spinners in Australia is dependent upon their ability to extract maximum bounce from the hard pitches, as Lyon has done so effectively in his career.”
This has been patently clear so far. Craig has been butchered by the Australian batsman because he is so easy to read through the air. Across the two Tests, the Kiwi has taken six wickets at an average of 73 – figures which, as horrendous as they are, actually flatter him immensely.
Craig is yet to take one proper wicket in the whole series – all six of his breakthroughs have come in junk time as Australia have been slogging towards an imminent declaration.
Because Craig doesn’t get much work on the ball – he merely rolls his deliveries out rather than ripping them like Lyon – he doesn’t earn the same bounce and elusive dip on his deliveries as does Lyon. The Australian tweaker hasn’t had a prolific series but played a pivotal role in the first Test win and has an admirable Test record at home for a finger spinner.
The key difference between Lyon and Craig is that the former has not only regularly beaten New Zealand batsmen in the flight, but also has repeatedly surprised them with his kick off the pitch.
Overspin. Overspin. Overspin. That’s all visiting tweakers need to know about bowling in Australia.