It isn’t often I wish an opponent of Essex good luck but Jack Leach, Somerset’s left-arm spinner, deserves it after spending the winter remodelling an action few even suspected was flawed.
Leach, who took 65 wickets for Somerset in the County Championship last season, was set to spend the winter for England Lions when routine filming at Loughborough picked up a kink in his bowling arm. Under the current Laws, flexion of up to 15 degrees is allowed. Those interpreting the footage must have felt it exceeded this and moved to cure it before he reached the international stage, Leach being, potentially, just a few five-wicket hauls away from an England place.
Instead of spending two months in Sri Lanka and enhancing his reputation on spinner-friendly pitches, Leach, 25, was forced to undertake remedial work, much of it with Peter Such, England’s lead spin bowling coach. He managed to play the second ‘Test’ against Sri Lanka A, taking three wickets with his new action, but he says it is only in the last month that he has managed to leave all the disruption behind him.
There are two main hurdles to overcome when you remodel an action questioned of throwing – the mental duress arising from the stigma of being labelled a chucker, and the difficulty of re-fashioning the mechanics of an action that has been well-grooved for years prior to the glitch being spotted.
Neither are easy to overcome though the stigma has been reduced due to the sheer numbers of bowlers being banned at international level – Saeed Ajmal, Marlon Samuels and Mohammad Hafeez – and then sent for corrective work, often at the University of Western Australia.
I remember the panic that set in when Phil Tufnell, another left-arm spinner, was accused of chucking by Ian Smith on England’s tour of New Zealand in 1991/92. It was mischief-making by Smith, the Kiwi’s wicket-keeper at the time, but it almost worked as Tufnell, with whom I was rooming, fretted about the matter to the point where neither of us was getting any sleep.
To calm him, my solution was to ask him who the best umpires in the world were? “English umpires, of course” he said, wondering where this 2am chat was going. Well then, had he ever been called for throwing in county cricket? “Never,” he replied. In that case what was he worrying about? The logic seemed to calm him enough for us not only to get some kip, but for him to turn in a match-winning performance in the first Test at Christchurch a week later. Yet it showed how easy it is for even a casual accusation of chucking to sow doubt into a bowler’s mind.
Usually there are murmurs first about bowlers who push the limits on bent arms but in Leach’s case, there has been nothing of note. One umpire I spoke to said that Leach’s slightly front-on action and the straight angle at which his front foot lands make him slightly more prone to an impure action, but that is a long way from being a smoking gun.
Any repair work has to start with the individual who must not only accept there is a problem, but then buy into the fact that he must do something about it. One former Test spinner, who has also coached, reckons that a re-chaining process has to take place. This involves work on getting the alignment of body and feet sorted, in a fairly static way, then the arm action, before moving on to the run-up and follow-through. It can be a frustrating and repetitive process.
In Leach’s case, the flaw in his action was so minor that the remedy was also correspondingly small. And yet the mental duress, as he recently admitted, was the hardest part. That and trying to forget you ever had a problem in the first place. In that respect this season will be doubly testing not least because the expectation from others is that he will not be as effective as before. Take Saeed Ajmal, whose deeds as an off-spinner for Pakistan and Worcestershire were legendary until the ICC cracked down on extravagant elbow flexion.
Ajmal, due mainly to the slow pace of Asian pitches, had found a way of getting large amounts of spin, both ways, at great pace, at least for a spinner. Batsmen couldn’t really use their feet to smother the turn so if they couldn’t read his doosra, any chance of survival for more than a few overs was slim.
All this was achieved with a degree of bent elbow now considered illegal, forcing Ajmal to rejig his action which he has done. Duly amended, he remains a formidable operator, yet because he can no longer bowl at the same pace, or get quite the same kick from his doosra, few teams, other than the odd T20 franchise, seek his services. The irony is he remains far better than anything England possess in the spin department, it is just that the law of diminishing returns, or at least the perception of it, is crueller in sport than just about any other walk of life.
I feel there is also a difference between bowlers who have grown up with a flaw, uncorrected, in their action and those who deliberately throw to gain an advantage.
Leach, Ajmal and Muttiah Muralitharan, are all in the first group and deserve our sympathy and understanding whereas Tony Locke, who threw his quicker ball to great effect, knew exactly what he was doing.
Those bowlers should be punished, which of course Locke was, his quicker ball called as a no-ball until he cut it from his repertoire.
Hopefully, Leach will thrive with his new action, not too much against Essex this weekend, but over the coming months.
Making changes, especially to a precision action like his, is not easy. Just look at the mess an alteration in run-up made of Steven Finn’s bowling, and he was a brutish fast bowler not a sensitive spinner. For that alone, we should wish him well.
This piece originally featured in The Cricket Paper, April 14 2017
Subscribe to the digital edition of The Cricket Paper here
