Everyone remembers the big over when a T20 batter lays into a bowler and the boundaries flow like overpriced beer in a cricket ground. What’s less obvious, but arguably more influential, is when an innings goes clanking off the rails with a trickle of downbeat gropes at thin air. Adil Rashid should be forever remembered for the mad, mad wicket maiden he bowled today.

It was a bit like when the Millennium Falcon’s hyperdrive malfunctions. As a viewer, you were primed for one particular type of excitement, only to be served up a very different flavour of dramatic moment.

“Watch this,” said Pakistan.

And then almost immediately: “I think we’re in trouble.”

After England beat India in the semi final, we restated our position that Adil Rashid is still England’s best limited overs player. We’re not exactly impartial on this, having been overenthusiastically talking him up since 2006 – but we do think we have a case. The opening batters, Alex Hales and Jos Buttler, are of course hugely influential, but they’re not irreplaceable in the same way that Rashid is. You can tell this because it wasn’t so long ago that England’s openers were equally hugely influential… but called Jason Roy and Jonny Bairstow.

Rashid was already having a good day when he came on to bowl his third over against Pakistan. He’d taken a wicket with his first ball of the day, after all – which is always handy. But this was a bit different.

Pakistan were 84-2, there were nine overs to go and they’d just taken things up a notch with 16 runs off a Liam Livingstone over.

Rashid promptly dismissed Babar Azam caught and bowled with his first delivery and then spent the next five balls watching Iftikhar Ahmed play uncertain prods, most of which absolutely middled patches of complete thin air several inches to the side of the ball.

One wicket, zero runs, at a point in the game when Pakistan really needed to accelerate and had very much looked like doing so.

We felt pretty sick with nerves for much of England’s run chase and we can see why Ben Stokes’ name will again be in all the headlines. At the same time, we’ll never forget Adil Rashid’s wicket maiden. It was truly one of the great, spoilsport, stick-in-the-spokes interventions.

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They talk a lot about ‘the death’ in T20 cricket. We’re not sure it’s an appropriate label for the latter stages of India’s T20 World Cup semi-final innings. They were already on life support after six overs and rigor mortis had pretty much set in by the end of the 12th when Adil Rashid finished his spell.

The conventional ‘death’ was actually pretty great for India. While Hardik Pandya could definitely have improved on his 63 off 33 balls, he could only realistically have done so by not treading on his stumps off the final delivery.

So we’re not talking about a great stack of runs left unclaimed here. Hardik did his bit. The problem was the platform.

We’ve been watching a programme called ARCTIC ALONE recently. (It seems wrong to write the title in anything but upper case.) It’s a survival show where they dump 10 people in Alaska at the start of autumn with a smattering of useful items and challenge them to last 100 days. (They even have to do all the filming themselves.)

It’s lonely and tough and at times disgusting. (Roland is keeping a musk ox’s brain in a bag made from its scrotum and occasionally clawing bits out to use as a face balm.) One of the main things they need to do is of course catch/gather food. A big job if they manage that is contriving a place to store the food so that it doesn’t get eaten by a bear.

Joel, a South African fella, thought he’d go aerial. He topped three trees (getting knocked off his homemade ladder when one trunk fell) and built an elevated platform between them. He took a while over this construction project and made sure it was robust. A few days later, he discovered that wolverines could climb.

The moral here is that not every platform is a good one. Sometimes you spend a long time slowly building one only to find out that you’ve pissed away an awful lot of time and energy that you can never get back.

India were 38-1 after their six-over powerless play. Rohit Sharma was on 20 off 18 balls and Virat Kohli was on 12 off 13. After Adil Rashid had bowled three more overs and finished his stint, India were 77-3 and Kohli was on 29 off 26 balls.

For all the focus on England’s batting over recent years, we are entirely adamant that Adil Rashid has been their best player of this limited overs era. He’s not had a flawless tournament this time around, but delivered 1-20 off his four overs today.

“We kept it tight, kept them under pressure, and I felt okay,” he said at the innings break.

Yeah, Rash. You’re within your rights to feel okay after that effort.

So 12 overs in and India had built what turned out to be a rather pointless platform for ‘the death’.

Obviously it’s not as simple as just hitting out sooner. You can kind of tell from Say/Sy‘s head position that this one didn’t go precisely where he intended.

Nevertheless, 77 runs in that 12-over period looks outright preposterous now that the dust is settling.

Jos Buttler and Alex Hales made 63 runs in the first six overs of England’s innings and 123 in the first 12. It was an approach that bought them a surfeit of time.

It depends who you ask, but the death overs are often considered to be the final four.

India made 58.

England made zero.

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It’s time to write an article about Yorkshire because eventually the absence of something can start to look deeply suspicious.

In 2006, before this site even had its own domain name, we made a snarky comment about how Adil Rashid had made a splash by being a Yorkshire-born player of Asian origin who played a match for Yorkshire. “That really shouldn’t be news,” we pointed out.

And in a perfect world, it shouldn’t have been. It should have been just a thing that regularly happened. But of course it was news.

Our feeling at the time was that 2006 was plenty late enough that Yorkshire should already have been fully exploiting the playing resources available to them in lower levels of cricket.

So we made a comment. And when we didn’t say anything else for 15 years.

Perhaps we mentioned it again in passing at some point or other. Yorkshire’s record in this area is certainly a thing we’ve thought about from time to time. But the point is it didn’t become a thing we went on about. It wasn’t a thing we repeated again and again and again – and Lord knows, this is a website that is unafraid to repeat itself.

And that’s not good enough really, is it?

Now we’re not kidding ourself that we’d have made any difference to Yorkshire County Cricket Club or wider society. We are however saying that in neglecting to repeatedly highlight something that we thought was very shit, we failed in a social duty. And probably we’re not alone in that.

Our non-campaign seems symptomatic of the way many of us thoughtlessly acquiesce if a problem is sufficiently deep-rooted and long-standing. We honestly felt like there would be a whole series of Asian heritage cricketers at Yorkshire after Rashid, but it took a while to discover that wouldn’t be the case and there was no real extra newsworthy moment to provide a lightning rod for that failure. News is things happening and Yorkshire’s pathetic record was very much characterised by things not happening.

The upshot is that we basically criticised Yorkshire the one time they showed signs of making progress.

There was obviously a reason why Yorkshire always had such an unrepresentatively white playing staff; it obviously wasn’t a good reason; and now we’re starting to learn why – or at least some of the reasons why, because of course that team environment didn’t materialise in a vacuum.

And what a team environment it was/is.

Playing for Yorkshire

When Andrew Gale, as captain, (allegedly) said he wanted to get back to, ’11 players, Yorkshire born and bred,’ that wasn’t insanely welcoming to a young player born in Pakistan.

Calling all players with non-English names “Kevin” isn’t friendly either. Neither is calling someone a “Paki” or an “elephant washer”. If you argue that telling all the non-white players they have to sit together is a joke, is it a joke that’s going to make them feel part of the wider team or somehow distinct from everyone else?

When Michael Vaughan (again allegedly – although given that three of the four players he was addressing agree that he said it…) told some of his team-mates, “there’s too many of you lot – we need to have a word about that,” perhaps that was a joke, yeah?

Perhaps – let’s be generous here – perhaps in Vaughan’s head, the joke was how ludicrously far removed from his true feelings such a sentiment was. But even if that were the case, how can anyone else know that for certain? Simply by saying such a thing, you force people to try and interpret it. It cannot be shrugged off.

Because perhaps it wasn’t a joke. Perhaps it was serious. Perhaps it was serious and merely the tip of a whole iceberg of antipathy towards you. Perhaps it also isn’t a joke when people tell ‘your lot’ you all have to sit together. Perhaps even the silent bystanders think these exact same things and the joke is on you for believing all of these comments might be just ‘banter’.

Imagine going through those same thought processes every single time there’s some comment at your expense. Imagine how wearing it must be. Imagine how alienating it would feel to be forever trying to gauge the exact degree to which you might be unwelcome with each and every one of your team-mates.

“There’s too many of you lot – we need to have a word about that.” Maybe it’s just a joke – but then the four of you never play another game together…

Imagine training and playing with these people. Imagine travelling with them and staying in hotels with them. Imagine that life.

Now imagine being at training and you get a phone call in which you learn there’s no heartbeat from your unborn son. Imagine looking to the people around you and, in Azeem Rafiq’s words: “They weren’t really bothered.”

Maybe that wasn’t racism. Maybe it was just a bunch of blokes who’d spent their whole lives playing a game for a living not knowing how to deal with real life. But maybe this constant othering – this so-called banter built on victimisation – built an emotional distance that resulted in a basic failure of humanity.

Imagine playing for Yorkshire.

Not playing for Yorkshire

“He probably doesn’t remember it because it doesn’t mean anything to him,” said Rafiq about the Vaughan comment.

That’s been the environment: casually hostile without ever really giving it a second thought. What does that result in? It means that even if all else is equal – which of course it isn’t – it’s that much more of an uphill struggle for an Asian heritage cricketer to establish themselves and then excel in first-class cricket.

In 2021, in a county where 60-70 per cent of recreational cricket is played by people of South Asian origin, Adil Rashid is the only British Pakistani cricketer in Yorkshire’s first team squad.

People can talk about pathways and listening and learning and how they’re working to do more, but those facts say this is easier to resolve than that. We’re not talking needles in haystacks here. We’re talking needles in big piles of needles with the odd bit of straw poking out.

This is worth highlighting. This is worth mentioning a lot more than we do. It is a thing we should all be talking about reflexively so that we don’t ebb back into, “They’re working at it – hopefully we’ll see some results in the coming years.”

Yorkshire’s record is terrible. Other counties aren’t much better. The number of black British professional cricketers has also bombed – down by 75 per cent in the last 25 years.

We, as fans, can’t resolve these things. But we can sure as shit moan about them. It takes great bravery for a victim to call out institutional racism. It also takes a certain amount for colleagues of those victims to raise concerns when they’re most likely complaining about team-mates and bosses. It takes no bravery whatsoever to shout from the sidelines though. There’s no excuse for not doing so.

It may seem futile and it probably won’t achieve a lot, but if enough people make noise about these things, it keeps those topics alive. If nothing else, it may be enough to prick the odd bubble and allow awareness of the wider world to rinse a festering subculture or two.

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You’re no longer allowed to write about T20 without referencing “match-ups” so that is what we’re going to do. Brace yourselves for some IN DEPTH ANALYSIS.

In the unlikely event you’re not au fait with the concept of the match-up, it’s a tactical thing where you try and pit a given batter or bowler against a specific type of opponent in each phase of a game.

At a very basic level, if a batter is shite against leg-spin then you try and bowl a leg-spinner to them. Or it can be more specific. Maybe they struggle to score against wide yorkers delivered by a left-armer from round the wicket during the powerplay. So ideally you have someone who can do that.

It becomes strategic too. If you’re up against a team with loads of right-handers, maybe you’ll want to pick more spinners who turn the ball away from the bat. But then maybe the opposition see this coming and pick a left-hander or two to disrupt the rhythm.

It can all get a bit game theory-y, but it’s an easy way to analyse what is after all a fundamentally formulaic format. The concept of match-ups therefore underpins the selection of most sides.

Identifying beneficial match-ups is a way to maximise your side’s potential and you can sometimes eke out a crucial advantage by unearthing one in some unexpected corner of the game. But then you can also win a lot of matches by having players like Jos Buttler and Adil Rashid.

There are definitely ways of using these players that are more productive, but debate about these finer points often overlooks the fact that these differences pale next to the sheer overwhelming usefulness of having these players available in the first place.

Take, for example, Jos Buttler. In the lead-up to the T20 World Cup there was much debate about whether Buttler was best used as an opener where he could potentially face more deliveries, or further down the order where he long ago proved himself a genius.

The answer is that it doesn’t matter. Well, it does matter – you would obviously get different outcomes – but there is no properly wrong answer. Buttler is a brilliant T20 opener and a brilliant T20 finisher and a brilliant T20 middle-overser. He is a brilliant T20 batter. He is a good option whatever you do with him.

Rashid too might have a better record against some types of batter than others and is used in a way to maximise his effectiveness, but the broader truth is that whenever you see fit to bowl him, he’s fantastic.

We’re not trying to rubbish or diminish the timely deployment of playing resources here. We’re just pointing out that the timeliness of deployment is sometimes of less significance than the playing resource itself.

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When we wrote about how Adil Rashid is almost as good a batsman as Stuart Broad the other day, a number of people saw this as some kind of slur. Maybe they misinterpreted our words because they for some inexplicable reason do not believe that Stuart Broad is a quite wonderful batsman. Or maybe we were wrong to use a shot that resulted in his dismissal to illustrate the perfectly joyous way in which Rashid ‘plays the percentages’.

Let’s correct the second part.

In our 2019 World Cup preview profile thing, we described Rashid the finest timer of a cricket ball in the entire England batting line-up. It is this, combined with his woeful shot selection, that makes him great.

A lot of international batsmen have great timing. That’s a big part of why they’re international batsmen. A lot of tail-enders have woeful shot selection. That’s often a major part of why they’re tail-enders. What we don’t often see is someone demonstrating just how exquisite their timing truly is through repeatedly attempting strokes so ludicrously ‘low percentage’ as to be borderline suicidal.

Few batsmen explore the margins of batting possibility as reliably as Adil Rashid.

As a counterpoint to the skyer we wrote about earlier in the week, here he is gently lofting the ball over backward point for four.

Step1

Take guard outside off stump.

Step 2

Take a big stride towards square leg.

Step 3

Open bat face so that the chances of striking an 87mph full, wide delivery with something other than the edge are practically nil.

Step 4

Middle it. (Note in particular how the bat face is now actually pointing away from where the ball came from.)

Step 5

Totally normal follow-through as ball goes for four.

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Stuart Broad is the greatest batsman in the history of cricket. Everybody knows that. What people don’t know is that Adil Rashid is almost as good.

One of the great tragedies of England having loads of bowlers who can bat is that fans very rarely get to catch a glimpse of Adil Rashid attempting to square-drive yorkers off middle stump.

Rashid is a batsman who always plays the percentages. He doesn’t play them like other people though. The way Adil Rashid plays the percentages is he works out precisely which shot is most likely to result in his dismissal and then plays that one.

What follows is a five-step breakdown of a very good and fairly typical Adil Rashid shot.

Step 1: Inexplicably get on back foot to full length delivery and move front foot so that you can slog to leg – then slog to off.

Step 2: Sky cricket ball while leaping into the air slightly.

Step 3: No, seriously, absolutely sky it. Straight up.

Step 4: Nonchalant follow-through.

Step 5: Return to pavilion.

Update: For the sake of balance and to make our point more clearly and explicitly, here is a breakdown of Adil Rashid lofting the ball for four over backward point.

Adil Rashid is England’s best player and don’t let anyone or anything tell you otherwise. (Definitely don’t let anything tell you otherwise. Don’t start listening to the toaster on this one. What the hell does it know?)

Rashid’s job is to create chaos when the opposition batsmen get used to pace bowling and start accumulating runs effortlessly and without risk. He spins the ball both ways, he pretty much always takes wickets and if he also concedes a few runs – well, don’t know if you’ve noticed, but that’s kind of how one-day cricket works these days.

Loads of batsmen score quickly. Scoring quickly is normal. What is no longer normal is a bowler who routinely dismisses batsmen when they’ve got their eye in and every other ball seems to be going to the boundary. This is what Adil Rashid does. The fact that this is inexplicably undervalued by pretty much everyone commenting on one-day cricket is either monumentally annoying or half the joy. We can’t decide which.

Rashid is also the finest timer of a cricket ball in the entire England batting line-up; a quality that he almost wholly negates by only ever attempting to play the most ludicrously low percentage shots.

Let us tell you about the other members of England’s World Cup squad

7 minute read

We reckon this article will take you somewhere around six minutes to read. Only you can decide whether you trust us to justify that gargantuan investment of your valuable time. (You might also feel moved to make an angry comment afterwards, so maybe factor that time in too).

We’d argue that what might at first look like an overlong examination of a very specific selection dilemma actually leads to far more interesting, broader questions about how teams are selected and how Test matches are won. But that’s just our opinion. What we’re saying is don’t feel obliged to read on.

Leach or Rashid?

In the wake of England’s Test series victory over Sri Lanka, some observed that Jack Leach took more wickets than Adil Rashid at a lower average and concluded that Leach is therefore ‘better’ and should be picked ahead of Rashid when England inevitably play fewer than three spinners in future matches.

This is wrong. But it is not so obviously wrong that we don’t have to explain it.

To explain why Adil Rashid should be picked ahead of Jack Leach in a one- or two-spinner line-up, as well as alongside him in a three-spinner line-up, we first have to ask ‘What do England want?’ and we then have to add a whole load of context to that question because actually that’s a terrible question to ask.

What do England want?

The answer to this question is ‘the better spinner’ or something similarly vague. We need to be precise here. Let’s first try and work out what the rest of England’s attack would look like if they played fewer spinners because only then can we get some idea what we’re after.

This is easier said than done, but, just as a starting point, let’s take the side that played and won the first two Tests against Sri Lanka before Sam Curran strained one of his sides.

The batting order wasn’t fixed, but the 11 players were…

1. Rory Burns
2. Keaton Jennings
3. Ben Stokes
4. Joe Root
5. Jos Buttler
6. Moeen Ali
7. Ben Foakes
8. Sam Curran
9. Adil Rashid
10. Jack Leach
11. James Anderson

The obvious swap to make for less overwhelmingly spin-centric conditions is Stuart Broad for one of the spinners.

However, since then, Jonny Bairstow has made a hundred batting at three and this has really thrown a huge clanking spanner in the works. If he carries on in that spot, England will either have to ditch a middle-order batsman (Root or Buttler, so no, that’s not happening) or one of their bowling options.

So either (a) we’re down to five bowlers plus Joe Root’s part-time spin or (b) Jonny Bairstow isn’t playing and England are back to rotating number threes.

Five bowlers sounds like plenty, but England’s recent success has been built on total bits and pieces cricket. You could argue that the team only truly works with six bowlers, which is a bit mental but might also be true.

In a five bowler situation… okay, we’re going to have to disagree with ourself slightly here. In a five bowler situation, your non-Moeen Ali spinner* will probably do a lot of bowling and may be asked to keep things tight while the three seamers attack from the other end. The alternative is that Ben Stokes bowls quite a lot and Ben Stokes works better when he bowls only slightly or just a medium amount.

* As you’ve no doubt deduced by this point, we’re assuming Moeen Ali should play in all of these scenarios. This seems a fair assumption to us because somehow or other, batting or bowling, there is a very good chance that Moeen Ali will be wonderful in any given match.

BUT…

Here’s the thing. Here’s the crux of the matter. A five-man England bowling attack is not a good England bowling attack. It can do a job, it may win some matches, but a five-man attack gives away the one advantage England have managed to stumble onto: having an effective bowler for (nearly) every circumstance.

The Leach v Rashid argument is a good one because it is an archetype. It lets you pick a side and say something about yourself. It is finger spin v wrist spin, reliable v unreliable, predictable v magical.

Of course it’s not that simple – Jack Leach can bowl breathtaking deliveries; Adil Rashid can bowl tight, accurate spells – but there’s enough truth in there that we can run with it. Fundamentally, Leach is more likely to provide control and pressure, Rashid is more likely to do something exceptional. Which do you value more?

Your preference doesn’t matter

Whichever you personally value more, we’d argue that this particular England team should give greater weight to the peaks of Rashid. There are definitely times when the only things likely to get a team a wicket are fast bowling or wrist spin. The England bowling attack needs a coping mechanism for these times. As wonderful as Leach’s bowling is (and it is), the England attack doesn’t really need accurate, dependable, challenging finger spin.

Does a five or six-man attack need the second spin bowler to shoulder an enormous workload? Not really. Not when they’re playing in conditions where they’re looking to field three or four seam bowlers. Does it need an option when fast-medium and finger spin can’t break a partnership? Yes. This is the gap that needs filling and Adil Rashid remains England’s best option – same as he was a year ago.

So what we’re saying here is: either (a) you have a five-man attack and accept that Adil Rashid is going to bowl a lot of overs (to keep Ben Stokes reasonably fresh) or (b) you pick six bowlers and ditch a batsman.

We’d ditch a batsman.

How d’ya feel about that, Jonny?

Let’s now take Rashid v Bairstow in isolation. Unlike ‘finger spinner v wrist spinner’, ‘guy-who-just-made-a-hundred-at-number-three v wrist spinner’ is not an archetypal question, but it’s again an interesting one because it pits the value of run-scoring against the value of wicket-taking.

A lot of people think runs ‘win’ matches. Again, this is wrong. But we’ll come to that in a minute. Let’s first look at Bairstow’s case to be considered a number three batsman.

Bairstow’s case to be considered a number three batsman is not strong. This might sound an odd thing to say about a guy who literally just made a hundred batting at three, but we’d argue that batting at three in Sri Lanka is much more like batting at six in many other parts of the world – and so far, that is all the evidence we have.

(Think of it like this: if we were to rank all of the world’s Test grounds by how likely it is that a number three batsman will have the shit bounced out of him when he first comes to the crease, Colombo would appear quite low down.)

(We could almost argue that Bairstow’s hundred at number three actually strengthened the case for him batting down the order, but let’s not go down that route.)

Next, the run-scorer v wicket-taker bit

The case for a good number three batsman is basically that Bairstow might score a hundred. He might score a hundred-or-so runs, and everyone knows that when someone scores a hundred-or-so runs that is good for the team and the team stands a better chance of winning.

But what is the cost? If he plays instead of Rashid, maybe a batsman Rashid would have dismissed in single figures will instead make a hundred runs. One wicket doesn’t sound a lot, but that’s literally all we’re talking about when we’re talking about Bairstow’s possible-hundred.

This is what we’re arguing. We’re saying that even if Rashid averages 38 with the ball, he takes wickets no-one else can and in so doing saves his team-mates’ bowling averages from greater damage. Plus he’ll probably take a few other wickets (the tail, for example, who can be real bastards to get out in this sickening modern age of professionalism). He’ll score a handful of extremely fun runs down the order too – maybe even more than Bairstow would have scored.

It doesn’t really matter though because of course they’ll never drop Bairstow and then pick Rashid

Even if you think it’s the right thing to do, can you imagine leaving out a guy from this England team who just made a hundred batting at three? Can you imagine how that would be received by the people who are paid to voice opinions about said team? It’s just not an option.

(Although if we were going to argue it, we’d say this: Bairstow has repeatedly proven himself to be a person who is incredibly motivated by a desire to “prove the doubters wrong”. This even applies even when he has to go to quite a bit of trouble to imagine-up said doubters in the first place. (Literally no-one was slagging you off because you got injured playing football, Jonny. That was criticism of football, not you. It’s a completely different thing.) We’re pretty confident that dropping Bairstow immediately after he’s scored a hundred pretty much guarantees a double hundred next time you pick him.)

An alternative to all of the above

A couple of hundred words ago, we said that there are times when the only things likely to get a team a wicket are fast bowling or wrist spin. An alternative to picking Rashid could therefore be picking Olly Stone.

If you wanted a flat pitch option AND Jonny Bairstow AND Jack Leach AND only five bowlers, you could pick Stone instead of Stuart Broad.

This makes a certain sense, but again it is very hard to see it happening. Dropping Broad for a seamer probably wouldn’t go down anywhere near as well as when they dropped him for a spinner in Sri Lanka (“I don’t think I’d have made a particularly big difference”).

In summary

Adil Rashid should play. When he doesn’t play, and someone else plays instead, and England don’t do very well, these are the reasons we’ll be annoyed about it.

2 minute read

England got to have a go at partnership-breaking when the ball wasn’t doing a right lot today. Everyone had a go and everyone failed and then Joe Root finally gave Adil Rashid a bowl and he got both lads out.

That’s a very simplistic way to describe how things went, but it’s also good to keep in mind. Partnership-breaking when the ball isn’t doing a right lot is a very important aspect of cricket outside England. From time to time it’s actually more important than the ability to concede only 2.1 runs an over.

It’s also worth bearing in mind when you look at Adil Rashid’s Test record. For most of this series, he’s been given just five, six or seven overs an innings. Today he didn’t really get a proper spell until KL Rahul and Rishabh Pant had put on 200. Imagine being a seam bowler treated like that. Imagine what you’d average. The answer is ‘even more than Adil Rashid’.

Rashid generally gets to bowl when things are going badly for England; on flat pitches when batsmen are scoring fairly easily.

There are two ways this can pan out.

1. He has zero impact and the two set batsmen continue to score runs
2. He takes a magical wicket and totally reverses the momentum of the game

Even if Rashid were the best bowler in history, the first of those would be way more likely – yet when it understandably happens he is regarded as a failure because there are almost no other circumstances on which to judge him. Perceptions of his bowling seem… unfairly weighted.

Today, KL Rahul batted brilliantly, but he fell to a delivery that appeared to bounce off an invisible side wall. Rishabh Pant batted brilliantly, but he didn’t seem to pick the wrong ‘un and played the ball more up than along.

Adil Rashid turned his arm over and dismissed two centurions. A few overs later England took the new ball and he drifted off back into the outfield.

2 minute read

As in ‘returned’. He hasn’t got ankylosing spondylitis or anything.

Is Adil Rashid a bowler who can take wickets when others cannot? Yeah, probably. Sometimes.

Does Adil Rashid’s selection for the Test squad having previously jacked in red ball cricket maybe raise a couple of awkward questions? Erm, yeah, probably. But let’s focus on the wickets, eh?

What was the point of that red ball retirement?

Earlier this year, Adil Rashid supposedly gave up first-class cricket to become a white ball specialist. A major reason why he did this was because he suspected that he was not going to play Test cricket under England’s current captain.

Rashid didn’t think this for no reason. He’d been England’s first-choice spinner for the tour of India and while he didn’t perform spectacularly, he did better than everyone else and well enough that he’d have expected to retain his place. Instead he was dropped. Double-dropped even.

England picked Mason Crane as their second spinner on the Ashes tour, even though it was clear to everyone that he was never actually going to play.

Rashid thought about this and he thought about how he could make an unarguable case for reselection bowling leg-spin in the County Championship. With half the matches played in April and May and England clearly not much interested in picking him for Tests, he concluded that he’d be pissing in the wind.

We’re not sure whether you’ve ever tried pissing in the wind, but honestly, there’s little to be gained from it. More often than not you’ll end up thinking that you never should have commenced the piss in the first place. Rashid therefore binned red ball cricket to focus on his England career. It’s worth noting that he subsequently played very well.

Worked out well though, didn’t it?

Who knows what happens next, but thanks to a change in selection policy and good form in limited overs cricket, Adil Rashid has won back his place in England’s Test squad.

When Jos Buttler came back into the Test team off the back of his IPL returns, he said that it wasn’t a question of playing the right format.  He pointed out that in an alternate universe, maybe he’d have made five first-class hundreds for Lancashire and won his place back that way.

That’s true, but the same doesn’t hold for Rashid. The chances of a leggie tearing it up in the Championship on damp seamers is nil because no matter what form he’d been in, he simply wouldn’t have been given the ball. He’d have been lucky to get three overs. He might not even have been picked.

Conclusion

Plenty of people will moan about Adil Rashid’s return, but it’s hard to envisage any other way he could have won his place back.

Good luck to him.