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Hands up The Roar readers, how many of you had heard of Michael Beer before his selection for the Australian cricket side to play England at Perth? I thought so. Only a couple of hands up.
In fact I had heard of Beer, but knew nothing about him, from reading Peter Roebuck’s columns in the SMH. Roebuck had mentioned his name as a possible long-term Australian spinner, some time after the Ashes series, though.
Already the jokes are being to be aired about his unexpected selection. An English reader of The Roar asked me in an email if ‘England can handle their Beer?’ He also suggested that ‘Richie, I hear, is a bit miffed about not getting a call-up.’
I think I can see a pattern in the selectors thinking about Beer. He is a tallish left-arm finger spinner who they reckon will get a bit of bounce at Perth. Why would they want this type of bowler when Nathan Hauritz, who is also a finger spinner but right-handed, has taken a five-wicket bag at Perth already this season?
The answer to this is that the selectors are obsessed with the fact that Kevin Pietersen has been dismissed 18 times (with his last dismissal by Xavier Doherty) in Test cricket by left-arm fingers spinners. Stephen O’Keefe (another leftie) dismissed him at Hobart for Australia A. And Beer dismissed him at Perth when England played West Australia before the Ashes series started.
In my opinion there is not much method in this and a lot of madness. Batsmen have to be dismissed by someone. If you go through Sir Donald Bradman’s record you’ll probably find that he was dismissed a lot by part-time bowlers. What the 18 dismissals of Pietersen by lefties and the Bradman dismissals don’t tell us is when they and why happened.
In Bradman’s case, on average, after he had scored near enough to 100 runs. And in Pietersen’s case, after he had scored more than 50 and at Adelaide after a double-century. Most batsmen would settle for being suspectible to finger-spinners after they’ve scored a hatful of runs.
This obsession by the selectors with playing a left-hand spinner to somehow get Pietersen out cheaply is a false strategy, in my opinion. If Australia had a really good left-arm finger-spinner spinner, someone like Bishen Bedi, then – perhaps – the strategy would be a workable one.
But Australia has never produced a world class left-arm finger-spinner. The best of them was the tradesman, Ray Bright. The left-arm spinners before him, Johnny Martin and Lindsay Kline were wrist spinners (and good ones) whose stock ball was the ball that spun in, the ‘Chinaman.’
You often hear commentators talk about the ball that moves away, either in swing or spin, as the ‘most dangerous’ delivery. Well, in my opinion, the ball that moves in is much more dangerous.
What about Shane Warne? And Richie Benaud? Bill O’Reilly? And Clarrie Grimmett? They represent the golden line of the greatest Australian spinners. All of them were right-arm leg-spinners.
They were wrist-spinners rather than finger-spinners like Beer, Doherty, and Ray Bright. As wrist spinners they had the top-spinner (the ball that skids through as it straightens up) and the wrong’un (the ball that spins in towards the stumps which is bowled with a leg-spin action).
If you go through the records of Warne, Benaud, O’Reilly and Grimmett you’ll find that the majority of their wickets came from top-spinners and wrong-uns. O’Reilly, in fact, used to bowl to a field with two fieldsman standing metres away from the batsmen’s hip in silly mid-on positions.
The thing about the ball that moves away from the bat is that if the swing or spin is big enough to deceive batsmen, it generally moves too much and beats the bats and stumps.
The ball that deceives a batsman by moving in towards the stumps is often a wicket ball, either bowled, LBW or caught at short leg.
The problem for off-spinners in the past, unless they were great practictioners like Jim Laker, is that the predictable in-turn can be thwarted by pad-play or just anticipating the movement of the ball into the bat.
But in recent years we’ve seen the development of the doosra (which is the right-hand finger spinner’s equivalent of the wrong-un) and the top-spinner. The effect of these developments, together with the change in the laws allowing finger-spinners to throw (think Murali), has given an edge to the finger spinners that the wrist spinners used to have.
I’m hoping that Beer turns up trumps at Perth. Australia needs a stopper in their attack, the role that Stuart Clark used to play when the opposition batting got on top of the front line attack.
There is nothing in Beer’s record to suggest that he will by able to do this in Test cricket, however. His average per wicket in first class cricket, 16 at 40, including 3 – 108 and 2 – 99 against England at Perth, suggest that he is not the tight, maiden-over-after-maiden over that a successful spinner needs to be.
In my opinion the selectors would have done better for the battling Australian XI by leaving the spinning to Steve Smith, an emerging wrist spinner, with some back-up from the part-time right-hand finger spinner David Hussey.
I hope this analysis is totally wrong. But somehow I don’t think this will be the case.