Australia's spin future in a league of its own

Brett, I'm definitely interested in ongoing updates (of order 1 per month?) on the FL.

Greg are you talking about Ian Bell as the batsman?

Thanks Dave, a very interesting article. The Chappelli version of events is reasonably accurate, as is the point of the story as he tells it: the all-importance of flight for a spin bowler. The bit about only needing a few balls to tell is my additional take on this story (I wrote "One point of this story ..."). It's true. It's rare that you don't see straight away whether a new bowler is something special. I knew within Wayne Parnell's first over in Australia (at the T20I in Brisbane) that he was the goods, and subsequent events have been consistent with that judgement. With batsmen it's more difficult, because great batting is as much about making no errors over hours of batting as it is about being able to play great shots. Almost anyone can play a great cover drive. What very, very few people can do is to bat hours and hours against quality bowling without making a mistake. It can take a season or longer to tell if a batsman has that essential skill.

The squad that went to England in 1985 was light on experience because Rixon, McCurdy, Alderman, Maguire and Rackemann pulled oout to join the rebel tour of South Africa

I have to agree with FP here. I really get the feeling Hussey in particular is holding the Aussies back of late. In the modern game you can't carry players through bad patches like this. Mark Taylor was lucky, his streak went on for almost a year from memory and there were calls after just a few tests to drop him but he kept his spot. Then, like now there was plenty of players waiting in the wings but they just didn't get their chances. I'd rather see a team picked with one eye on the future, we can't afford to go to England every 4 years and bring 3 or 4 players with Ashes experience along. Teams shouldn't change that much inside a 4 year period that you're taking an entirely new squad away, there needs to be a focus on bringing in players and allowing them to gain experience before we expect them to hold the Australian team together which is what is expected of Johnson now with his 26 tests he is supposed to carry the bowling?

Greg, I'll address your earlier point a little later, but for now I'll just say I've always been a gate-keeper of obscure information - ask my wife!!

http://www.smh.com.au/news/business/money/planning/profile-ashley-mallett/2009/01/19/1232213539701.html?page=fullpage#contentSwap1 ".....Mallett, who was born in Sydney but moved to Perth when he was 10, credits former Australian leg spinner Clarrie Grimmett with launching his career. When he caught the train across the Nullarbor to Adelaide to visit Grimmett, Mallett had been 12th man for Western Australia a few times but wasn't taking enough wickets. Within a year, he was selected to play for Australia. His first coaching session with Grimmett, then age 76, did not go well. Grimmett handed him a bat, bowled one ball to him, then asked Mallett to bowl one ball to him. His verdict? "Give up bowling and become a batsman." Grimmett told Mallett he was too predictable and proved it by facing the next ball with a handkerchief tied across his eyes and deflecting it with the middle of the bat. "It was a brilliant reality check," says Mallett, who paid Grimmett $6.50 a lesson over the next year, learning to pitch the ball higher above the batsman's eyeline to make it harder to judge the trajectory. It's this sort of coaching that Mallett believes is now lacking in Australian cricket, especially at junior levels. "You have the little 10-year-old bowling leggies, then he grows taller and the ball goes over the wicket-keeper's head because he's tossing it too high," Mallett says. "It's not rocket science - it's all a bit sad really."....."

Don't get me started on Brad Hodge! It's an absolute disgrace that he's been repeatedly ignored. I agree with you to some extent in relation to not using Test cricket as a finishing school, but would stand-out youngsters not benefit enormously by exposure in their early 20s as well as their mid and/or late 20s? I also wonder whether that slowly slowly approach comes from a historic position of strength; one that Australia has now surrendered somewhat. For years other leading Test-playing nations have blooded 20-22 year olds with regularity and many of them go on to become integral Test players by the age of 24-25. There was a time when Aussies could merely say something like, "We're the best. We don't need to pick youngsters like our rivals; we only the pick the finished article" and point to the eternally youthful Michael 'Pup' Clarke as representing the younger generation. Well the facts are that Australia has lost on its past 2 trips to England, so too on two of past 3 trips to India, and also recently losing at home to South Africa. Is Australia in such a strong position to rigidly stick to its policy of leaving promising youngsters to do 5-6 years of hard yards in first-class cricket (with some, perhaps, getting a go in ODIs) and waiting for each and every incumbent to more or less choose his own retirement? I think it's time to ditch the sentimentality and favouritsm and pick sides in the hope of WINNING. This doesn't seem to have been the case of late (eg: the selection of Brett Lee and Andrew Symonds in the last Perth Test; the exclusion of Andrew McDonald in England) Should the likes of Mike Hussey and (in particular) Lee be holding back strongly performing youngsters? Will Nathan Hauritz, Shane Watson or Cameron White (how on earth did he even play ONE Test?) be holding back younger (and arguably more talented) rivals in the next couple of years?

PS. May I emulate the comments of some others above and say what a really valuable article this is - it has really added to my knowledge bank. Thanks Brett! You have marshalled obscure information impressively and very usefully. I won't ask how many anoraks you went through!

Brett, a belated response. Ian Chappell tells the story that the young Ashley Mallett was invited around to Clarrie Grimmett's place for a bowl in his Adelaide backyard. A stump was placed in the ground and Mallett bowled a ball. Much to the youngster's surprise, Grimmett then pulled out the stump and announced "I've seen enough". One point of this story is that it generally only takes a couple of balls to tell if a bowler has the goods, especially a spin bowler. Tell me that your first sight of Warne or Harbhajan (or Vettori or MacGill or ...) was not enough to convince you that these guys had something special. The other thing you would know from years of following cricket is that it's only really the special spinners who make it long-term. Journeymen come and go and have the odd good season (is Graeme Swann in this category?), but it's rare for them to make big improvements that last long-term. I mean, just look at Cam White. His bowling started to decline, so he spent a winter under the tutelage of Shane Warne, after which he played tests in India as a specialist spinner. Unbelievably, that was just a year ago. Where is he now? Well he's off to India again with an Australian team, but this time as a specialist ODI batsman who basically has stopped bowling. In other words, the progress under Warne has amounted to nothing in the long term for White. Why should it be any different with bowlers artificially advantaged by the special rules of the new competition when they hit hard reality? (e.g. bowling to the top Indian batsmen!). Maybe I'm overly pessimistic, and certainly I'm taking a different angle here from my initial comment about "creat[ing] some kind of false economy" (you make my comment sound far more lucid than it really was!), but really I'm of the belief that a top-level international spinner is propelled by his own natural talent, rather than being created by special inducements in first-class cricket. As I've said before, my belief is that we just have to wait for the next special talent to arrive. Maybe it's Jon Holland (I don't know - I haven't seen him bowl), maybe it isn't. But I'd be very surprised if this new competition speeds up this process. At the same time, I'd be happy if you are proven right and I am proven wrong on this, because we really need a top-class spinner or two! And the good news is that spinners who have what it takes will stand out in this new competition, regardless of the special incentives. In other words, these changes cannot do any harm.

Fisher, I know what you're getting at, but I'll come back from a different angle. I don't particularly want the Australian Cricket team used a finishing school for young kids with potential, as we've seen in some other sports. A young kid has to demand selection, not have it gifted to him on a silver platter. And I do agree with you about Phillip Hughes, but I don't know that someone like Brad Hodge would offer much agreement about rough treatment..

I wonder whether the Australian Test selectors will actually start picking young players; as opposed to the occasional 'young' player in their mid to late 20s... Philip Hughes was an exception. And we all saw what they did with him.

Quite right Freud, we don't need another generation of robotic, overly technical young players. Phillip Hughes is a case in point - yes, he's got a few little things to iron out, but we should never force on him (nor expect from him) a textbook-perfect technique. We have to let natural talent and ability develop too, and that's something else I can see coming out of this competition. They'll still have all the state structures around them, but their flair and natural games should be allowed to come through. Again, despite this article focussing on the spin-promotion of the Futures League, that's not the sole purpose of the comp, and so I wouldn't say the comp has been tweaked to give them more opportunities. There's definitely incentive to use spin bowlers, but if the spinners aren't there to use, then they won't be. The Futures League revamp is all about developing young talent of all categories. You mentioned harnessing the talents of young bats - something else I said to my concerned mate yesterday was that I did notice in the scorecards that there looks be a lot of all-rounders coming through: bats who bowl a bit, bowlers making handy runs. So I think this could be happening sort of organically. Did you know Michael Bevan was a pretty reasonable left-arm quick when he made his first grade debut in Canberra?? Like a lot of young quicks, I believe it was a back injury (something about a bike crash too, I think) that forced the move to spin. And just on the West Indies and their use of spin over the years (or lack thereof), Trinidad & Tobago took 3 spinners into last night's CLT20 game in Bangalore, and did quite the job on Somerset. So they've got spinners in Caribbean somewhere...

You’re right Brett, Australia’s pitches aren’t especially suited to spinners although if you were to look at the major grounds, you’d have to say the SCG, MCG and Adelaide oval are better for spin than pace, the WACA and the Gabba are obviously good for pace and Hobart is more-or-less just for batting. However we shouldn’t be moulding our future generations on the basis of how our pitches play, we should harness whatever talent we have ala Slater, he was good at playing aggressively so let him do so. Australia has always produced good-to-great fast bowlers and will continue to do so into the future, spinners will only come sporadically. As Vinay mentioned, we should focus on getting some good coaching in for them rather than tweaking competitions to give them more chances. Further, you need 3/4 quicks and a spinner for a “balanced” lineup and more teams have had success without a good spin option than without good pace options, the Windies being the prime example. I think we should focus on both aspects, we can’t force talent which isn’t there. Australia will however continue to churn out batsmen like they’re going out of fashion, perhaps we should look at harnessing the bowling talents of some good batsmen, someone like Michael Clarke or Michael Bevan are good examples. Both could have been a pretty good bowlers, we’re unlikely to find a leg-spinner that turns it square but we’ve seen Clarke in both Tests and ODI’s and he can be a handful. If we could harness these bowling talents and make more of our batsmen into batting all-rounders it would be a better solution than picking spinners for the sake of having a spinner.

It’s interesting to see that we are all roundly praising the idea of giving up-and-coming spinners a leg up in the cricket world but isn’t that a little narrow-minded? Don’t get me wrong, a junior league of sorts is a fantastic idea and one I am very very happy to read about and if the South Aussies spinners are able to use it to regain places in the first XI then that alone will have been worth it. However it seems we are a little nostalgic for the good old days where Warne was tearing teams apart, then heaven forbid he got injured or did something stupid and we had MacGill, yes STUART MACGILL! as backup. The point has already been made that such talent is rare and comes only every generation or so and hence building a league that is focused on developing talent that doesn’t exist at the moment seems a little silly although as the name implies, perhaps “future” minded. However I can’t imagine the sole purpose behind it is to improve spin-bowling, of course young players will face more spin-bowling which will be advantageous for their development and I like your point about the captaincy Brett, an important point which shouldn’t be underestimated but look at Hughes for example, his problem is with the short ball, something a lot of young Aussies have had over the last decade. At the height of the Windies power their batsmen were fantastic playing the short ball because they practiced against top quality fast bowlers. My point being we can’t look to develop a team like India, excellent against spin but with a few weak points against the seamers because SAF and Pakistan will continue to churn out excellent quick bowlers. I for one though would like to see more tours for the younger guys, get them some good experience on the sub-continent before they make that step up to international level. It would be worth it for CA to look at a feeder-club type system with some of the Indian and South African domestic teams allowing the best Aussie players (not just spinners) to go and play abroad for a season - even if this costs us money, the development will be worth it in the long term.

Shane Warne was one of a kind and emulating him is difficult..great players seldom make good coaches..Kapil Dev and Viv Richards are prime examples..Genius is hard to bottle and harder still to convey..what is commonplace for the greats is a mountain too high for most... Warne will certainly help but you need more time than Warne is spending with them...If Warne could spend a whole season mentoring these kids we would get somewhere..not flying visits Isee Kersi wrote about a young Indian bowler theother day..the irony was he is a fast bowler...Come In Indian Spinner!

Thanks Vinay, nice to have your agreement for a change!! (I do jest..) As far as I was aware, CA have employed one SK Warne to do exactly what you speak of - work with young spinners about the mental side of things, and more importantly, to work with young captains (and even old captains) on how best to use spin bowlers. Cullen Bailey was brought on first change in the second innings against Victoria, so there's good signs. And you're right, this should remain a key program, not just a five year plan...