English Spinners

[Spiderlounge]

Re: English Spinners

Do you guys feel that is changing in England?

If the treatment of Adil Rashid earlier this year is anything to go by, the short answer is no. The way they messed him about and didn't play him in the one place it would have been perfect to let him get a couple of test matches under his belt (Bangladesh) is probably the textbook example of how NOT to encourage a young leg-spinner.

 

[someblokecalleddave]

Re: English Spinners

Do you guys feel that is changing in England?

In 20 years time are we going to see an English spinner that can take on the best evers?

I reckon there's a chance, the 'Warne effect' helps and the ECB are working on encouraging spinners so yeah maybe?

 

[someblokecalleddave]

Re: English Spinners

I'm with you guys here on the lack of knowledge on it.
I try to bowl wristy leg spin, and love doing so, however not one person at my old club knew anything about it or even how to help with it. I was pretty much left to own devices whilst at net sessions the pacers would all be watching each other etc. Its generally got a mentality of no one knows about it, therefore it doesn't get any help and then because those bowlers are less tuned/accomplished it means the pacers get all the bowling time and its a viscous circle. Apart from maybe 1 or the only guys I ever really see bowl spin seem to be batsmen who can't be arsed with long run ups or the older chaps who dont have the fitness to !

It's a very common re-occuring theme it seems at club level and as you say the few that do bowl a bit of spin rarely have any technical knowledge and don't seem to be bothered to work with you or have the skills or patience to work with you even if you are enthusiastic. Then you've got the fact that you'd have to work bloody hard on your own and be able to come up with a result when they did decide to throw you the ball. Any screw-ups at that point might then push you back out into the spin-bowling wastelands once again.

 

[Boris]

Re: English Spinners

How suitable are the grounds over there as a whole for spin bowling? At club level to you get greentops or can you find some turning pitches?

And going from the two answers, I'm going to go with a 'maybe' for my last question

 

[SteveyD]

Re: English Spinners

How suitable are the grounds over there as a whole for spin bowling? At club level to you get greentops or can you find some turning pitches?

And going from the two answers, I'm going to go with a 'maybe' for my last question

Hm
Last season i found maybe 2 ? pitches that were suitable for spin really at my level. And one of them was really suited to it, managed to get it turning around batsmens legs !
I think this season might be better now that i've moved to east anglia, over here we get very little rain and I would expect a lot drier pitches.

 

[someblokecalleddave]

Re: English Spinners

Hm
Last season i found maybe 2 ? pitches that were suitable for spin really at my level. And one of them was really suited to it, managed to get it turning around batsmens legs !
I think this season might be better now that i've moved to east anglia, over here we get very little rain and I would expect a lot drier pitches.

It's difficult to say, different councils maintain pitches to massively varying levels for a start and some are privately maintained by trained groundsmen etc. I've never played on a pitch for instance that has covers on it ever, whereas I've had responses from others that have suggested they only ever see pitches which are covered when the weather is bad. Geographically there's massively varying soil types in the UK and where I am it's primarily clay, but over the years this has been mixed with different types of lighter top-soil dressings. Additionally the size of the clubs roller or the councils roller and the frequency of how often it's used and when it's used has a bearing on the pitches performance and then there's the weather we have here. Where I am Essex it's as dry as places like Jordan, but then other times it'll rain for weeks - July right in the middle of the season has a tendency to be abnormally wet.

Our wickets tend to be green and fairly hard only for a short period of time, but then they get crumbly and that absorbs the spin and bounce and towards the end of the season if it's really dry there's virtually nothing to be had in the way of spin or bounce. There's too many variables to pigeon hole English wickets one way or another at club level.

 

[Liz Ward]

Re: English Spinners

...I think this season might be better now that i've moved to east anglia, over here we get very little rain and I would expect a lot drier pitches.

Last season was not bad... the season before, we dodged raindrops from the first week in May until the last week in September!


Spinning in the UK is a very precarious art... mainly due to the weather. We have four seasons and they can go from one extreme to the other... not necessarily in the right order. One month we can be under several inches of snow and the next could be positively Rivieraesque. The ground staff really do need to be on top of things and if you cannot get good staff, there is no hope. I have been on too many 'spongy' wickets where the moss has taken on a life of its own... definitely working harder than the staff .

Obviously, the higher up the ladder you go and the better leagues you play, the better the pitches. Dave has mentioned before about the muddy wickets and no cover. I really do not know how you can be expected to bowl pace on a churned up ground, let alone spin. Once this has happened, the staff will need to be super heros to get it back to anything lush.

Generally, the top starts the season quite green but if we have a good summer, especially in East Anglia [this year is supposed to be a scorcher] it can get cracked.

 

[someblokecalleddave]

Re: English Spinners

Last season was not bad... the season before, we dodged raindrops from the first week in May until the last week in September!


Spinning in the UK is a very precarious art... mainly due to the weather. We have four seasons and they can go from one extreme to the other... not necessarily in the right order. One month we can be under several inches of snow and the next could be positively Rivieraesque. The ground staff really do need to be on top of things and if you cannot get good staff, there is no hope. I have been on too many 'spongy' wickets where the moss has taken on a life of its own... definitely working harder than the staff .

Obviously, the higher up the ladder you go and the better leagues you play, the better the pitches. Dave has mentioned before about the muddy wickets and no cover. I really do not know how you can be expected to bowl pace on a churned up ground, let alone spin. Once this has happened, the staff will need to be super heros to get it back to anything lush.

Generally, the top starts the season quite green but if we have a good summer, especially in East Anglia [this year is supposed to be a scorcher] it can get cracked.

Peter Philpott in his Auto-biography 'A spinners yarn' tells a story about a match in Yorkshire played in August (I think) and it's called off because it snows heavily and that's in the middle of our summer. Alternatively we go weeks and weeks without rain and have back to back sunshine causing droughts and all sorts with the temp's getting up to 38 degress, albeit rare. Supposedly this summer there's an expectancy that we're going to top 40 and set a UK record.

 

[Jim2109]

Re: English Spinners

i think pitches are used a little too often as an excuse or a justification, when really a leg spinner should be able to get the ball to do something on absolutely any surface.

the difference in performance between a perfect spinning wicket (hard, dry, no grass cover, and abrasive) and an averagely poor club wicket (either damp and green, or a soft dustbowl) is how consistently you can find the seam, and how hard you spin the ball.

if you spin it hard and find the seam it will turn regardless. bounce is the only casualty of a poor pitch. there are obviously pitches that are almost unplayable, but they also affect seamers just as badly (e.g. waterlogged, massively uneven, etc).

i found over the winter, albeit in nets, that even the coldest, wettest, slippiest surfaces still do almost as much as perfect dry surfaces. the difference is that the ball does nothing off-seam, so youve got to have perfection in your control to find any consistency.

one very important thing to remember is that the pitch doesnt affect what the ball does in the air. if you land it on a good line and length, and spin it hard enough to get drift and dip, then you dont necessarily need turn and bounce anyway.

 

[Boris]

Re: English Spinners

Obviously I took England's climate a little more variable than I thought for it's size.

Over here the pitches do vary from ground to ground, but in Queensland you can go up and down the coast and find similar pitches for 500+ kilometres (where I've been anyway). They are usually hardish (dependant on the roller) but it's the wet season during cricket season so the pitches are almost always green with an even covering. It does get fairly dry in between rain (rain doesn't come regularly and consistently... when it rains it really does pour, then a few days later it's back to sunshine).

On the whole, though, the pitches are relatively the same without paying attention to the variables like specific maintenance etc.

Considering that if England were a state of Australia (interesting thought that ) then it would be the smallest, I was thinking that it would be even more consistent across it's entirety. I thought it would be a fairly soft, green and grippy pitches over there.

Strange the differences.

 

[Jim2109]

Re: English Spinners

Obviously I took England's climate a little more variable than I thought for it's size.

Over here the pitches do vary from ground to ground, but in Queensland you can go up and down the coast and find similar pitches for 500+ kilometres (where I've been anyway). They are usually hardish (dependant on the roller) but it's the wet season during cricket season so the pitches are almost always green with an even covering. It does get fairly dry in between rain (rain doesn't come regularly and consistently... when it rains it really does pour, then a few days later it's back to sunshine).

On the whole, though, the pitches are relatively the same without paying attention to the variables like specific maintenance etc.

Considering that if England were a state of Australia (interesting thought that ) then it would be the smallest, I was thinking that it would be even more consistent across it's entirety. I thought it would be a fairly soft, green and grippy pitches over there.

Strange the differences.

England is quite a strange country in that regard. pitches can vary massively just a few miles apart!!! the pitches local to me are all fairly soft, and they retain moisture quite well (clay soil). my local clubs pitch is reasonably grippy, the ball turns well on it, but its too soft so it has minimal bounce and no pace. whereas the club i play for is about 15-20 miles up the road, and their pitch is absolutely rock hard (including the outfield, so its not just good wicket preparation), drains extremely quickly and is almost never moist unless its literally rained that morning, and is super abrasive. the only problem there is that over the season it breaks up and come the end of the season its a cracked up dustbowl and harder to bowl spin on.

 

[Boris]

Re: English Spinners

I guess because of it's size, England has more access to be able to change pitches more readily.

Over here the huge distances involved mean that the pitches are quite far between but there are plenty of them. More or less most of them are left to their own devices, they get a water and a roll every day, but mostly by the same equipment in the same climate.

Over there, there is more use gained out of each pitch and dependant on how many use it, and who looks after it, the better it is taken care off. Different equipment is used and councils look after some. Over here the council generally hires a couple of blokes to look after all the major ones of a town (where I play now there are 3 turf pitches, where I used to play there are 12). The area that one council covers is also larger than the size of England itself, so I guess over there you could have much different amounts of funding for each pitch and different guys looking after all of them when they are only a few kilometres away from each other.

 

[Jim2109]

Re: English Spinners

i think all of the clubs round me have their own grounds which they maintain privately. certainly every club has its own groundsman. hence massive variations in preparation, and the resulting difference in pitch. also some of the clubs have been at the same site for over 200 years, so the squares have been prepared for centuries and thus are very different to a council sports complex that is 5 years old with improper maintenance. hence the vast variation in pitches.

 

[Boris]

Re: English Spinners

Yes, I can see why now.

Generally the turf pitches are in groups of 2 or 3 that one groundsman prepares, then the next 2 or 3 is up to another, but with the same equipment (or near to it), even though they may be seperate sides of the town.

Also have huge variations of quality, clubs can be playing on a variety of different quality pitches because of rain and whatnot. Some are bindi filled dustbowls and others are international quality, but club players play across all of them.

 

[legspinner_don]

Re: English Spinners

I'd say it's also related to climated in a more obvious way. In Britain, practicing in the winter takes some balls. Soil is usually frozen or very damp, and, especially this winter, barely gets above 0. Access to indoor facilities where I am (Edinburgh) is limited to about 2 or 3 places, and it costs a bomb. And it's dark by 4. In short, you have to seriously dedicated to be practice in the winter, and for a country that is not as 'sporty' as Australia, this dedication is rare (probably limited to the posters in this thread)!

In Australia you could practice almost all year round if you wanted. I wish I'd spent some of the winter practicing, as I'm basically trying to remodel my action and will have to write off bowling in a match until August, if I'm lucky.

 

[Boris]

Re: English Spinners

Yeah it's hard for me to imagine the cold. In winter I think it's absolutely freezing at times... but last year I wore a jumper twice.

All in all which would be the better place to play cricket from your point of view?

 

[someblokecalleddave]

Re: English Spinners

Obviously I took England's climate a little more variable than I thought for it's size.

.

We're a small country with a shed load of people on it, but we're surrounded by water and no matter where you are you're never more than 71 miles from the coast. As a result we're subjected to primarily weather patterns that eminate from the North Atlantic ocean, so that's normally cool wet air. In the summer we get winds that blow up from central Europe and that gives us our warmer conditions, but they're always pushed out of the way by Atlantic weather patterns and rarely last very long. As a result of the island factor we have prevailing SW and NW conditions most of the time and that's Atlantic dampness. We then get weird fronts where one side of the weather front can be warm and sunny as in April 1993 and the other side freezing cold with a foot of snow! All contributing to our inconsistent wickets!

 

[Boris]

Re: English Spinners

Australia's weather is equally weird, but in other ways, and not so much effecting cricket. Plus the weather more carries over longer distances, so bigger areas all at once.

 

[someblokecalleddave]

Re: English Spinners

Yeah it's hard for me to imagine the cold. In winter I think it's absolutely freezing at times... but last year I wore a jumper twice.

All in all which would be the better place to play cricket from your point of view?

Jesus! Your place without a doubt, but then again some of our pitches as Jim mentioned are 200 - 300 years old maybe more and they're in amazingly beautiful locations and are the birth-place of this great sport, so yeah if you think about it, we have crap horrible winters, but come this time of the year it turns into something a bit special albeit be it unpredictable, so maybe not? If you're priveliged enough to be able to travel around the world, it would be great to be able to say that you'd experienced both in all the varieties.

 

[someblokecalleddave]

Re: English Spinners

Australia's weather is equally weird, but in other ways, and not so much effecting cricket. Plus the weather more carries over longer distances, so bigger areas all at once.

I've noticed in the USA because it's a large land mass that they're able to predict their weather really efficiently, because the wind patterns are not so affected by variables at ground level. A wind/weather pattern moving over a land mass is moving across a consistent or slowly changing temperature change, whereas wind moving off of cold wet ocean then hitting a land mass that is different makes the weather change in all sorts of ways, so moving across such a small area the weather rarely gets to settle in the same way across large land masses.