“If you don’t know how to read wrist spin you can’t afford to run down the wicket.” - Denys Hobson, former leg spinner
Sunday Times
TELFORD VICE in Cape Town
DENYS Hobson’s long and close relationship with wrist spin kept him away from Newlands last week.
“I didn’t bother going because I knew what was going to happen,” he said on Thursday.
The previous evening Yuzvendra Chahal and Kuldeep Yadav took 8/69 between them to help India rout South Africa by 124 runs.
That brought the number of wickets Chahal and Yadav, wrist spinners both, took in the first three matches of the one-day series to 21. Or 77.78% of the 27 scalps claimed by bowlers.
Impressed? Not everyone was.
“They’re ordinary, man,” Abdurahman, or “Lefty”, Adams said.
Hobson took 374 wickets at 27.52 bowling leg spin in 105 first-class matches, 94 of them for the white Western Province team.
Adams earned 27 first-class caps for the non-racial Western Province side, taking 122 wickets at 15.47.
He bowled slow left-arm orthodox, which might account for his opinion of Chahal and Yadav, and he would likely take issue with Hobson referring to other types of trundlers as “non-wrist spinners”.
The two might also disagree on how to disarm the threat posed by India’s slow poisoners.
“The problem is they’re not reading them,” Hobson said. “The first ball [Aiden] Markram faced from Kuldeep [at Newlands] he ran down the wicket.”
And was easily stumped.
“First of all that was stupid,” Hobson said. “Second of all it was the googly. So if you don’t know how to read it you can’t afford to run down the wicket.”
Hobson would no doubt enjoy the joke contemporaries make about about how they picked his deliveries by the sound the seam of the ball made as it ripped revolutions through the air: “The leg break went ‘vrrr’, the googly went ‘rrrv’.”
For Adams no such sleuthing should be required.
“Once a spinner settles on a length, and you as the batsman stays stagnant in the crease, he’s going to knock you over,” he said.
“Batsmen don’t use their feet because the wicketkeeper is standing up, but that’s not the point. If you have the measure of the bowler in the flight use your feet and get behind the ball.
“Then the bowler will shorten his length and you will have all the time in the world to play him.”
The wrist spinner South Africa faced before India’s tour offered a different idea.
“I think it’s about them not being exposed to more wrist spin,” Graeme Cremer, the leg spinner who captained Zimbabwe in the Boxing Day test at St George’s Park, said.
“South Africa don’t seem to produce many wrist spinners, partly cause of the pitches they play on.
“Wrist spin is a fine art, and if you are bowling at your peak it is really hard as a batsman, especially when the ball is drifting and spinning. Also wrist spinners have a wider range of variations.”
There are other reasons, beyond Chahal and Yadav, why India have South Africa in a spin.
Injuries to Faf du Plessis, AB de Villiers and Quinton de Kock took 432 ODI caps out of South Africa’s collective experience at Newlands.
Khaya Zondo, David Miller and Heinrich Klaasen, South Africa’s middle order in Cape Town, had played 106 ODIs before Saturday’s match at the Wanderers. And 103 of those caps belonged to Miller.
Then there’s South Africa’s inconsistent approach.
In the first ODI at Kingsmead last Thursday, Du Plessis said, “We never play two spinners in ODIs in South Africa.
“I understand that’s maybe a tactic that India will use. We don’t do that here.”
Three days later in Centurion Imran Tahir and Tabraiz Shamsi were in the same South Africa XI.
At Newlands, the team batting first had won 23 of the previous 29 day/night ODIs but South Africa failed to exercise the option after winning the toss.
Might that be because India chased superbly to win at Kingsmead and in Centurion?
Here’s a starker question: have South Africa run out of their own ideas?
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