If you’re attentive and possessed of a decent memory, you’ll clock that the headline above is a very obvious reference to our December article, Root and Silverwood have the Jack Leach they created. There’s a contrast in man management here and if you read that article again, you’ll easily see it. This article could therefore quite easily end here in all honesty.

Jack Leach has performed better for England this summer than last summer. That is in large part because he didn’t actually get to play a Test between March and December 2021. For most of that time England didn’t even pick anyone ahead of him. They just picked no spinner at all. That was how much they thought of Leach and his art: ‘We’d rather have no-one’.

This kind of treatment is not what you’d call a confidence-builder. It doesn’t tell a player he’s a key part of the team. A player treated like that might even infer that he was only ever picked under duress.

Things may change, but Ben Stokes and Brendon McCullum have managed Leach differently. They’ve picked him for a start. That’s a vote of confidence in itself, but Stokes has also given him plenty of overs. In this New Zealand series, Leach has done more bowling than anyone bar Stuart Broad, despite brain-bruising himself out of the whole of the first Test.

It’s little things like unexpectedly asking him to open the bowling in the second innings at Headingley too. The ploy didn’t especially work, but it reinforced the message that Leach’s spin bowling isn’t just a last resort once the captain’s already tried all the proper bowlers. It’s a valued tool in its own right.

Leach went on to take five wickets in the innings after also taking five in the first. We can’t say exactly how he is feeling this summer compared to last, but we’re guessing taller.

We are willing to email you.

It’s probably best to avoid extrapolating from that England innings in a bid to predict the course of this Test match.

England went to Grenada and were at various points 53-3, 53-6, 114-9 and 204-9. This all added up to one of the weirdest-arsed scorecards you are ever likely to see.

What did the day’s play tell us? What does it mean? There are probably too many variables for it to tell us anything.

Take Zak Crawley’s dismissal, for example.

West Indies won the toss and bowled. Did Crawley simply fail to accept that he could find himself facing medium-pace in the 13th over? Did he forget that you could be caught out by fielders in cricket? Maybe it was the lethal power of Kyle Mayers’ scrambled seam, but he just looked like a batter who’d been incorrectly calibrated.

A pretty even mix of great deliveries and nonsense followed that first dismissal until we quite quickly reached the 10th wicket partnership – and what that passage of play tells us is anyone’s guess. Number 11, Saqib Mahmood, top-scored in the innings with his highest first-class score, while number 10, Jack Leach, was the unbeaten man and second highest scorer.

Impressively, this only barely gets onto the podium of silly Jack Leach innings behind that time he scored 92 opening the batting in the second innings after coming in at 11 in the first and that time he made 1 not out.

Here he played your classic obdurate Leach innings. The lad’s a fighter.

But what was he up against? The great surprise was he didn’t hit his own wicket through dizziness. Jarrod Kimber pointed out that at one point the West Indies had used seven bowlers in 16 overs. This is bowling at 10 and 11 when quite often one bowler is sufficient.

It was fun tail-end cricket. Top shots, drops, byes and liberal use of the verb ‘squirt’ by the commentators – a hallmark of all the great last wicket partnerships.

And now the West Indies will bat and you can be pretty confident it will go differently.

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There is no right answer when it comes to England’s Test team selection right now. But there are different types of odd decision. The omission of a spinner for a day/night Test is the most predictable one.

England picked five right-arm fast-medium bowlers and no spinner for the day/night Test in Adelaide. That went so well that they picked three, plus a tired fast bowler and again no spinner in Hobart.

Once upon a time, working for a local newspaper, we spotted a weird result in a vegetable growing competition. One of the categories had a second-place but no winner. There was no third place either. It turned out the judges felt that despite Barbara’s kohlrabi not having any rivals, it was of insufficient quality to be handed first place. This is how she she came to finish second in a field of one.

No doubt the kohlrabi was fine with this, but you can’t imagine Barbara was delighted. Maybe she was furious and went away and grew the best fucking kohlrabi that had ever been grown. But maybe her sense of self-worth took a knock too.

While vegetable growing is pretty mellow and forgiving of uncertainty, bowling in Test matches isn’t really like that. Confidence is more than just an asset for a Test bowler; it’s an entry requirement. It’s hard to see how repeatedly being deemed second-best to no spinner at all has helped Jack Leach over the last few years.

Day-night Tests, in particular, seem to be an irresistible invitation for his team to put all their eggs in the Plan A basket with all subsequent letters utterly scorned. If it’s a day-night Test, England drop their spinner. The one thing you’ve got to credit them on is their conviction on this matter.

In Ahmedabad, in February 2021, Leach did actually get a game, but as England’s sole spinner. India, in contrast, picked three and they shared 19 wickets as England were bowled out for 112 and 81. Leach took four wickets in India’s first innings and Joe Root took 5-8 – a performance that kind of distracted from the crazy surplus of seam bowlers.

That was a bit of a freakish match though with extra skid combining with variable spin to make life really hard for the batters on both sides. England duly filed it away under “doesn’t count” and turned up in Adelaide with an attack comprising James Anderson, Stuart Broad, Ollie Robinson, Chris Woakes and Ben Stokes.

Despite this line-up, five of the 18 Australian wickets to fall in that match went to spin – three to Root and and two to Dawid Malan.

Denied the new ball, life was particularly tough for poor Chris Woakes. He took 1-103 in the first innings and went at 4.35 an over, plus a slightly more economical 0-46 off 12 in the second. Woakes is a really good bowler, but give him an old Kookaburra ball on an Australian pitch and even a beard isn’t going to save him.

So obviously he came back into the side for the next day-night Test in Australia, but this time as part of a four-man attack that also featured Mark Wood, a fast bowler who was rested when he wasn’t tired but who was being retained now that he’d a put a couple of serious shifts in.

England started the match well.

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The England Test team run by Joe Root and Chris Silverwood is not big on picking spinners. It is even less big on picking Jack Leach. A rare appearance in the first Ashes Test saw the left-armer get walloped, so how comfortable will the two head honchos be about picking him again? Perhaps the two of them should consider going back in time to try and build their first-choice spinner up a bit.

It seems fair to say that Root has a somewhat peculiar record when it comes to managing the spinners available to him. Adil Rashid was binned at the start of his captaincy before being brought back again on more than one occasion. It was also during his tenure that England gave three consecutive Test caps to spinners: Mason Crane, Jack Leach and Dom Bess.

Moeen Ali appeared to be one man who was at least sometimes blessed with the confidence of his captain – but how much of that was down to his spin bowling and how much due to his magnificent malleability?

For his part, Leach has never especially let anyone down, but he has been left out in the name of team balance so many times he must be starting to think he’s made of dark matter.

Sometimes England think Leach’s batting unbalances them, even though he once made 92 opening the batting in a Test and also hit the greatest 1 not out you’re ever likely to see.

On other occasions they convince themselves that the mere inclusion of a spinner unbalances them – a bizarre belief that seems to have manifested itself ever more frequently in the Silverwood era. His England teams have now played without one on half a dozen occasions. Not smart.

The upshot is that Jack Leach is the first-choice spinner who England would do almost anything not to pick. And now he has been savaged.

What does that mean, both now and into the future? Does it mean that Root and Silverwood were justified in their reluctance to trust him? Or have they in fact missed a whole host of opportunities to build up their best spinner so that he had more to fall back on when times got tough? More experience, more self-confidence, more goodwill from the men who pass judgement on his worth from one game to the next? All of these things come as a package.

England’s management team will no doubt talk supportively. Bowling coach Jon Lewis has already called Leach “a pretty resilient fella” – which is just as well given the team’s broader attitude to him and his art. Root and/or Silverwood will presumably back him in some way or other after the Test too. But these are just words.

Actions are famously more audible and this England team have opted to play without any kind of spinner on no fewer than six occasions. They have played without Leach a great many more times. At what point during a Test does a bowler start to dwell on the fact that his foundations are built on quicksand? After the match? After 10 overs? After being hit for the first six?

Leach averaged 29.98 going into this series, but he last played a Test in March. He has shown himself to be be a pretty good bowler, but it’s hard to move from ‘pretty good’ to ‘good’ when you’re only picked in conditions that suit you. Leach is not great on flat pitches and the way Root and Silverwood treat him, he never will be.

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England v Australia, third Test, day four

It’s six or out…

…

It’s six!

Jonathan Agnew, Test Match Special

Have you seen No Country For Old Men? You should watch No Country For Old Men.

No Country For Old Men is a striking and excellent film and while the ending is not immediately satisfying, that’s kind of the point. You’ll find you think about No Country For Old Men a fair bit more than the average film after it finishes.

One of the most exciting scenes involves Javier Bardem’s Anton Chigurh tossing a coin.

Heads or tails is not an especially exciting thing in itself. This coin toss is exciting because there’s something riding on it. Quite a lot in fact. No-one states it explicitly, but it is very clear that for this particular coin toss, the gas station attendant’s life is at stake.

Heads or tails?

Imagine that. A coin in the air and just two possible outcomes, one of which is unthinkable.

Watching the film, you feel this. It’s horrible, but it’s exciting.

Jeopardy

It was pointed out to us recently that we use the word ‘jeopardy’ a hell of a lot more than the average person. Despite this, the word is almost exclusively reserved for when we’re talking about cricket.

Jeopardy is at the heart of cricket drama. It is the reason why a six during a Test match run-chase with nine wickets down is infinitely more exciting than a six in the first over of a limited overs match.

Test Match Special commentator Jonathan Agnew put it best at the end of the 2019 Headingley Test. England were eight runs from victory and Australia were one wicket from victory and Ben Stokes had just launched the ball into the air.

“It’s six or out…” he said, and as the ball sailed through the air, all we could do was ponder which.

Imagine that: the ball in the air and just two possible outcomes, one of which is unthinkable.

Watching or listening, you felt it. You felt it so much more because of what was at stake. It was horrible, but it was exciting.

A six is not a six

The shortest formats are specifically engineered to encourage batsmen to try and hit sixes; to make them feel safe to do so. With ten wickets to use in 20 overs (or 100 balls), they can hit with near impunity.

But you can’t buy excitement so easily. By reducing the jeopardy, you also diminish the six. It’s not the fact that it arrives more frequently – it’s because of what’s at stake.

Imagine that before he tossed the coin, Chigurh had told the gas station attendant that it wasn’t all on this one toss; that he was willing to give him a good few chances and he’d toss several times.

The scene’s not quite so tense now, is it? It’s not quite so exciting.

No shortcuts

This is not to lay into the T20 format like there’s nothing of merit there. The aim here is to celebrate Test cricket and point out that its epic nature and long hours are precisely what help it transcend other sport.

You can’t strip away all but the most exciting 100 deliveries and expect a match to feel the same.

There are no shortcuts. Context is everything.

Take Ben Stokes, for example. The Ben Stokes story starts way back, but even if we limit it to this one Test match alone, he has a back story.

He is the guy who played a shit shot in the first innings when England were bowled out for 67.

He is the guy who bowled a leviathan of a spell and took crucial wickets when England found they were running out of fit bowlers in Australia’s second innings.

He is also the guy who had made three runs off 72 balls before he finally hit a boundary.

It all matters, but that last one is the biggie really. Taken in isolation three runs off 72 balls is not especially exciting. It was, in fact, excruciating to watch and doubtless just as excruciating to produce.

But it added to what was to come. The fact that Stokes played like that despite not knowing that it would add to what was to come only serves to elevate the importance of that passage of play further.

Ben Stokes made that investment against the odds and if you watched him, hoping that he would ultimately succeed, you made an emotional investment against those same odds.

The other hero

Superheroes are dull when they can do anything. The most memorable heroes are human and vulnerable. Cricket delivers this brilliantly because it always has the least competent batsman at the crease when the stakes are highest.

If you’re going to fail, fail early, because there is nothing more painful than getting close and losing. Nine wickets down, one shot from victory, both teams are as close to victory as it is possible to be. With all the work to get to that position, all that emotional investment, losing doesn’t come more painful.

Precisely because of this, the tension rises. Tension rises and the guy who’s batting now is the worst batsman of all – which only raises that tension further.

Number 11s are elite cricketers. They are elite bowlers who are also obliged to do a job for which they have no exceptional competence whatsoever.

They are fallible. This is why nine-wickets-down jeopardy is the greatest sporting jeopardy of all.

A top order batsman might thrill you with a lofted drive, but every single delivery a number 11 faces is a coin in the air with everything at stake. And in a Test match, it can go on like this indefinitely.

On day four of a five day Test match, there was no deadline in sight for Jack Leach. He had to block, he had to survive, and he had to keep on surviving while Ben Stokes accelerated time from the other end.

That No Country For Old Men scene is four minutes long and we don’t see the gas station attendant beforehand. All we know of him is what we see in that scene. That’s our entire emotional investment and yet those few seconds before he calls heads are excruciating.

A Test like Headingley 2019 provides a lot more back story than that, but the protracted tension of the climactic moments feeds into our emotional investment too.

Ben Stokes and Jack Leach batted together for an hour and every minute of that hour was more exciting than the last.

Heads or tails, we wondered.

First published in August 2019.

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No batsman can do it without the other guy. At Headingley, the other guy was Jack Leach.

Over at Cricket 365 we’re talking about Newt from Aliens and asking whether Leach is already England’s greatest number 11 batsman.

England v Ireland, only Test, day two

England desperately need to bolster their top order batting. The way we see it, two men who could really improve things are Somerset spin bowler Jack Leach, who batted at 11 in the first innings but made 92 yesterday, and Somerset spin bowler Dom Bess, who averages 37 in Test cricket.

Which Somerset spin bowler would make the better England top order batsman? (Because Thomas Lord knows, they can’t rely on anyone else to make the runs.)

It’s a difficult choice. Leach batted well yesterday and by no means disgraced himself with his unbeaten 1 in the first innings, but the fact remains that the 92 is really his only Test innings of note.

Bess, on the other hand, has only really failed the once. After being caught for five in his debut innings, he followed up with 57 before making 49 in his only other Test innings, batting at four as nightwatchman.

But then Leach does have more top order experience. You might think it unusual that a number 11 should open the batting for England – and in many ways it is – but Leach also stepped up in place of Keaton Jennings in November. He made 1 off 11 balls.

So there’s not much to choose between them really, except that Leach bats in glasses and made his 92 despite the fact they were repeatedly getting steamed up in mafting conditions.

On that basis we conclude that until such time as Dom Bess sees fit to renounce the contact lens, Jack Leach is the Somerset spin bowler England should pick as a top order batsman.

This is very difficult to answer. You might want to talk about both, but let’s imagine that we’ve only got one pint’s worth of time because we really should get back early because odds are we’re going to get woken up at about 5am, and yes, we could have another, but honestly it’s just not worth it.

In that precise scenario, who do we talk about?

Haseeb Hameed made a hundred, but then again it was only his first hundred in three years so not really all that important in the grand scheme of things. But then again-again, it was his first hundred in three years and Hameed has, at times, looked like what some people like to refer to as ‘the real deal’.

Jack Leach, for his part, took 6-36 in April and made his team win a cricket match.

Haseeb Hameed

Say what you like about the lad, he defies expectations.

Back in 2016, England threw down the gauntlet of lumens to see how the opener would react when exposed to its peculiar glovey glare.

Hameed responded very well, so they asked him to play Test cricket to see what would happen. What happened was he chugged along defensively and people called him Baby Boycott.

In his second innings, Baby Boycott hit a six and everyone wondered whether it was maybe time to get a wider selection of pigeonholes.

By the end of his debut series, Hameed had two fifties, an average of over 40, a long and glittering Test career ahead of him and a broken finger or thumb. (We can’t remember which and can’t be bothered checking. We think it was a thumb.)

Reinforcing his contempt for expectations, Hameed then scored no runs for several years. Now, with many people losing faith, he’s scoring runs again.

Jack Leach

Say what you like about the lad, he defies expectations.

Jack Leach is a spin bowler who averages 25 in first-class cricket and still doesn’t get picked for England very often. Jack Leach averages 24 for England.

Jack Leach is a man who takes cheap wickets at ‘Ciderabad’ where the pitches are somehow both spin-friendly and completely flat.

Jack Leach took 6-36 at Trent Bridge in April.

In April.

Jack Leach bowls in glasses.

So who are we talking about?

Strikes us that if we’re talking about batsmen making hundreds and spinners taking wickets in April, then maybe this year’s batch of balls isn’t quite so dibbly-dobbly as the last few years.

So let’s talk balls.

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 readEngland lost to Bangladesh. There has to be a reason for it and it has to be that they picked the wrong players. One obvious area in which England were inferior was the spin department. Last season Jack Leach took more wickets than the spinners who played in the last Test, therefore he is the solution. Get him on the plane to India.

There’s a train of logic there, but there are also a few assumptions. The main one is that there is a way England could have won. The series was close enough that it’s probably true on this occasion, but people tend to conclude much the same thing even when their side is on the receiving end of a complete shellacking. Magic bullets are easy to identify when you can’t go back in time to fire them.

Jack Leach appears to be considered just such a projectile by a number of people, so if you’ll permit us, we’d like to quickly run through the ‘Jack Leach as saviour’ scenario and make a couple of points.

The first point is that even if he performed better for England than Adil Rashid, Gareth Batty or Zafar Ansari, it is questionable whether things would be much different. ‘Better’ does not equate to ‘the answer’.

The second point relates to Leach’s performance in county cricket and his likely impact on Indian pitches. Leach was not actually the most successful spin bowler in the first division of the County Championship last season. He took 65 wickets, but Warwickshire’s Jeetan Patel took 69.

Patel is by almost any measure the superior bowler. Leach had a good season, but Patel has been reeling them off one after another. He is older, more experienced and succeeded in 2016 without quite so much assistance from the surfaces on which he played.

Conveniently, Jeetan Patel has just toured India with New Zealand. He played two Tests and took six wickets at 48.66. R Ashwin took 16 wickets in those two matches.

For this winter at least, it probably makes sense to keep Jack Leach in the freezer. At least then we all get to retain something to cling to.