The English media love to attack KP. You can’t blame them, the man is walking target, funny hair, celebrity wife, squeaky accent and interesting shot selection. At the moment their problem with him revolves around the fact he keeps going out to slow, and often rubbish, finger spinners. It is a disturbing run that he is having, but he certainly isn’t the only batsmen in world cricket that is going out to average finger spin. They are infesting the cricket world. The ICC ODI ranking system has Dan Vettori, Ray Price and Shakib Al Hasan as their top three ranked bowlers. At number seven is Harbhajan Singh, at 15, Johan Botha, 16 is Nathan Hauritz, 17 is Ajantha Mendis and rounding out the 20 is Abdur Razzak. That is eight finger spinners out of 20 bowlers, and that doesn’t include Murali at 18 (who is technically more of a wrist bowler) or Saeed Ajmal at 21. Shahid is there too. Test cricket has 5 finger spinners and two wrist spinners it its top 20 as well. Clearly it isn’t just KP getting out to finger spin, everyone is. You could argue that this is not even a particularly great crop of spin bowlers. Compared with Kumble, Mushtaq, Saqlain, Harbhajan, Murali, Vettori and Warne from the late 90s, this is a humble cast. Ray Price might have the fight of a Spartan Warrior, but he has the body of a middle-aged once a week squash player. Johan Botha is more machine than man; his legal deliveries are bowled with the variety of a 1980s robot. Paul Harris and Nathan Hauritz seem intent on proving everyone wrong. Graeme Swann has the personality of a cricket legend, but not the skill level. This is the age of the nagging finger spinner. The dour roller who just puts the ball in roughly the right spot while mixing his pace and occasionally doing something “radical” with the seem. The thought that all finger spinners would need the doosra to survive seems to have gone since, Swann, Harris, Hauritz, Price, Vettori, and Botha can’t (or in Botha’s case, legally can’t) bowl it. It seems to matter little. As long as you can nag, take the occasional beating and hold the ball back when you see the batsmen charge you have a chance. Smaller grounds, bigger bats and non-crumbling pitches were supposed to kill spin, but perhaps they have done the opposite. Now batsmen see an averagely talented spinner come on and instead of milking him like the players of yesteryear may have done, they try and belt him into a parallel universe. All this seems to have done is give Paul Harris and Nathan Hauritz careers. KP could argue that he isn’t in bad form against spinners; he is just following the popular zeitgeist that has turned Graeme Swann from a barely known county player to a global superstar with a chin to match. |
