In praise of the left arm orthodox

It’s a good time to be a left-arm spinner. Currently, some of the very best cricketers in the world belong to this underappreciated and undercelebrated club. I sing in praise of my left-arm orthodox brothers, and remember the time it was nearly something I was nearly pretty decent at.

Left-arm orthodox – even the term is unglamorous, has none of the allure of fast, of leg-spin, swing, or of that break-off sect, the Chinaman bowler.

Left-arm orthodox bowling is easy to do but hard to be successful in. It’s easy because a) your left-handedness gives you a natural difference b) you can turn the ball away from a right-hander without the complication of bowling behind the hand c) you don’t have to run in fast.

It’s hard because a) your angle, either over or round the wicket, makes it (or rather made it) difficult to get LBWs b) there are very few ways to deceive a batsman if you bowl left-arm orthodox c) when you bowl a bad ball, it’s just about the easiest thing to punish in all of cricket d) you are very reliant on factors outside your control to get wickets – the state of the pitch, your wicketkeeper, the mindset of the batsman. How many left-arm spinners can you think of in the history of cricket who were or are genuine strike bowlers, who do things which are shocking and brilliant, like Malcolm Marshall, Wasim Akram, Shane Warne, Murali? Essentially, a left arm orthodox bowler delivers the ball, fairly slowly, in an undisguised fashion, in roughly the same area, over and over again, and hopes for the best …

Yet Ravindra Jadeja is currently the Number 1 bowler in the world. And Shakib Al-Hasan is the Number 1 all-rounder in the world. And Rangana Herath is pushing 400 test wickets. None of them are, on the surface, breaking the mould. None of them are mystery bowlers, they’re classic, dull, left-arm spinners, just very very good ones.

Here are a few observations about the ebbs and flows of the leftie in my cricketing lifetime.

Tuffers, funny old Phil Tufnell, is the most thrilling left-arm spinner I’ve ever seen. He made it look magical, with his skip to the crease, his rip, his loop, his drift, his “ball on a string”. The Cat had about four magnificent days in test match cricket, where he seemed unplayable, took 5,6,7 fers … which were nearly always followed by 1-150 in the next match, even though there was no obvious difference in what he was doing.

Tufnell’s overall test match stats are disappointing, 100-odd wickets at around 37. A strong case can be made for saying that, if he played now, with DRS, he’d have got 200 wickets at 30, but, I must say, there’s another case to be made, which is that, if he played now, he wouldn’t get near the test team.

Like his successor, Monty Panesar, Tufnell was a beautiful left-arm spinner and a pretty hopeless all-round cricketer. If you look at the star left-arm spinners of recent times, Jadeja, Al-Hasan, Vettori, even (recently) Herath, what links them is that they are excellent all-round cricketers, averaging 20/30/40 with the bat. You need that these days, and, I think, rightly so. There may well be test match after test match where pitch conditions becalm the left-arm spinner, there is no help at all and you are going to be used mainly as a stock bowler, you’re going to end up with 40 overs, 1 for 100, you’ll have done a valuable job for the team which has killed your own stats, and if you carry on like that, your place in the side will be up for grabs soon. But not if you’ve got a 50 or two. Those 50s (or even 15s!) never came from Panesar or Tufnell – hence it only took a couple of unproductive games for them to be jettisoned.

When I was young, I wished I bowled like Tufnell and batted like David Gower. In truth, I bowled more like Richard Illingworth and batted more like Jack Russell. Perhaps inspired by watching Tufnell, my team mates were relentlessly on at me to “give it some air”. As I fired ball after ball after ball down, I’d get used to the “loop” signals coming from slip and cover, which I tried to ignore. For a while, I knew what I was doing.

When I was 14/15/16, when I had the luxury and inclination to bowl, bowl, practice, practice, hone, hone, groove, groove, I was pretty good. That was the only way I was going to be pretty good – I had no special gifts, no mystery balls, no prodigious rip – if I bowled and bowled, I was confident that from ball 1 I would be able to put the ball in pretty much the same place over and over again. And that’s basically, at every level, from me to Rangana Herath, how a left-arm orthodox bowler gets his wickets. There are very few possible variations. There’s hardly been a left-arm doos’ra bowler, you don’t bowl toppers or flippers. There’s no point in bowling chinamen (left-arm wrist spinners) – there’s no deception and it takes the ball back into the right-hander anyway.

Saying that, my cricket teacher at school, a man called Gwyn Hughes, who’d himself bowled left-arm orthodox at county level, once bowled me in the nets with a Chinaman googly which left me collapsed on the floor. I have never seen a grown man (and a deadpan one at that) so gleeful at the result. Mr Hughes gave me very little advice, but what he did was perfect, and what was the point of giving more? “Six fielders on the offside, three on the legside, bowl at off-stump over and over again and don’t bowl any bad balls”.

That’s it, that’s all there is to it, and that served me extremely well for a couple of years while I was good enough to carry that out. Because once you’re doing that, you can just make those subtle variations – you can bowl one that bit wider, one that half a foot shorter, you can go wider of the crease, you can bowl your arm ball (holding the ball the other way round, and hopefully imperceptibly, swinging it in), you can even, heaven forbid, give it some loop.

But basically, I bowled in my groove. I set my mark, I shone the ball relentlessly on my right thigh – for the seamers, for my arm ball, for my peace of mind-, I muttered “come on, David”, I moved my imaginary fielders, I did keepie-uppies when the ball was defended back to me along the ground, I winced at the umpire when one was close, I hated every single run I gave away. Though I was often asked to, I hardly ever tried to buy a wicket by bringing a batsman out of his shell, making his eyes light up then tricking him with a better variation. I was rarely good enough to let go of my avarice. I remember a few precious moments when I was, when I looped one up and was hit over midwicket, then looped one a little bit higher and wider outside off  with a touch more spin, to elicit a ball skied to point or a stumping. That was the joy of it.

I got a fair few wickets – usually by boring batsmen into submission. I needed good fielders, an umpire with good eyesight and the willingness to make decisions, and a good wicketkeeper. The difference was enormous when it came to those sharp stumpings and thin edges.

But, more than wickets sometimes, I loved to bowl and bowl. That’s what a left-arm orthodox bowler can do sometimes. Just take an end and bowl it. Nothing made me happier than bowling 18, 22, 25, 26 overs in a row, just locked in my footsteps, gradually making my fingers bleed and my cricket whites red from the shine. Wickets would come or they wouldn’t – 18 overs 1 for 40 might be the best I ever bowled, far better than 10 overs 4 for 40. Left-armers rarely force people out – only if it’s late in a hot summer, if the fast bowlers’ footmarks have caused the pitch to rough up. Well, not on this continent, anyway.

There are very few left-arm spinners with test averages below 25 – Vettori, Edmonds, Al-Hasan, Tufnell, Panesar etc, they’re all in the 30s. Underwood, Jadeja, Bishen Bedi, Herath, Tony Lock are in the mid to high 20s, but there are none down at 20 (apart from outliers from the early days of cricket, like the magnificently named and moustached Johnny Briggs), like the truly greatest test bowlers. It’s a tough job, is my point – 6 for 40, then 1 for 150, 2 for 120, 0 for 100, when all you’re doing is the same thing over and over again, waiting for the day to go your way.

Of course, left-arm spinners have particularly come into their own in recent years with the truth that DRS provides (yes, all you umpires who turned down all those appeals of mine down the years, it wasn’t missing leg, it didn’t hit the pad outside, it was pitching off, hitting middle and leg, see!),  and also with one-day cricket. Left-arm spinners have their glory in the shorter forms, where that metronomic accuracy, those slight variations, that ability to adapt to a batsman forced to play reckless shots, brings it rewards – Sanath Jayasuriya, Jadeja, Shakib, even the likes of Suleiman Benn and Xavier Doherty – this is where they have their glory.

 And Dan Vettori, of a similar age to me and my favourite – an outstanding cricketer across all the forms of the game – one of the very few cricketers to have over 3000 test runs and 300 test wickets – he turned himself into a quality test batsman over time, but with his bowling, he did nothing different from 18 to 36, just rolled up and bowled and bowled and bowled.

Here, in no particular order, are my 10 favourite left-arm spinners.

Dan Vettori

Shakib al-Hasan

Umer Rashid

Phil Tufnell

Ashley Giles

Ravindra Jadeja

Suleiman Benn

Johnny Briggs

Derek Underwood

Monty Panesar