Simon Hughes
You hear a lot of talk about it being important to have a spinner in
a Test team, in the likely event of fielding last in the match. By the fourth innings, the pitch could be really damaged and pockmarked, and here the spinner can come into his own. In particular, there will be a lot of footmarks left by the bowlers down both sides of the pitch. It can be quite pitted in places. The ball bouncing in these areas can do almost anything, which is why the spinner aims into them. A spinner bowling into the rough is partly what makes chasing anything above 150 on the fifth day of a Test a bit of a lottery.
Unpredictability
The worst rough will usually be outside the right-handers leg stump, because the majority of quick bowlers are right-arm and operate over the wicket. The rough constitutes quite a large area on this fifth day Pakistani pitch (25). Both teams' spinners aimed into it and the ball behaved unpredictably, sometimes jumping, sometimes spinning viciously, sometimes scuttling. This makes the batsmen apprehensive about playing normal shots, the runs gradually dry up, until they become desperate and attempt something rash.
Taking care
This ball looks like a free hit for the batsman but there is a lot of rough. As the ball hits the rough area it can behave unpredictably and the batsman has to be careful.
Out of the park
A well directed ball into the rough by Ian Salisbury is met by an even better directed hit from Inzamam ul Haq.
Back in the hutch
This ball, into the rough, from Ashley Giles jumped up and hit the bats-man on the glove, giving Stewart a simple catch.
Cricket or football?
It was interesting to see the different ways that Pakistan and England approached playing this type of bowling. Whereas the English batsmen tended to 'kick' most of these deliveries away, hiding the bat behind their pad (the ball is pitching outside leg stump so lbw's are ruled out), the Pakistanis were intent on scoring off most of them. Sometimes it worked and sometimes it didn't. Inzamam ul Haq, a vast man with an even vaster weight of stroke, sized up this ball into the rough from Ian Salisbury, and larruped it ten rows back into the terraces (26). His younger and less powerful colleague Salim Elahi had visions of doing something similar against Ashley Giles. However, the ball landed in the rough, leapt onto his glove and was acrobatically caught by Alec Stewart. Elahi's innings was over (27).
A test of patience
Left-handed batsmen dread the rough a great deal more than right-handers because they can't just kick the ball away. They're forced to play at a lot of balls that are liable to misbehave. This doesn't necessarily mean they're going to get out more, though. It just means they need to be extra watchful (or extra lucky). That, in fact, is a microcosm of the spinner's art. On average, they need twice as many overs to take their wickets as pace bowlers do. They're winkling batsmen out rather than torpedoing them. In the duel between the batsman and the spinner, it's a test of patience more than anything else; as Warne himself once said, 'bowl a few maidens and the wickets will follow.' While the modern spinner might release the ball fairly slowly, he nevertheless thinks and acts as aggressively as the pacemen.
Copyright material reproduced under license from Macmillan Publishers Ltd. London, England
Copyright © Simon Hughes 2001
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