A COUPLE OF YEARS ago in these pages, we highlighted the declining effectiveness of finger-spin in Test cricket. Since then Muttiah Muralitharan has taken 16 wickets in a single Test, and leaped to second place (after Lance Gibbs) among all-time Test offspinners, an achievement which suggests that finger-spin – if novel, or prodigious, or in his case both – can still have an impact at Test level. On the hard, dry surface at The Oval, some of England's batting was as ham-fisted – or rather, thanks to Muralitharan's loop, ham-footed – as Australia's was against Jim Laker at Old Trafford in 1956. Reduce some film of The Oval match to crackly black-and-white footage, and some of the dismissals would look pretty similar, except that Muralitharan did not wear baggy flannels nor merely emit a quiet cough as his number of victims rose towards record proportions.

In county cricket, however, offspin's decline was not arrested at all last season, but accelerated. The only offspinner to reach 40 Championship wickets, never mind 50, was Saqlain Mushtaq (novel, if not prodigious), who like Muralitharan did his most effective work at The Oval. The probability must be that Surrey would have forced home the advantage when they had Leicestershire 102 for 4 in the last, winner-takes-all match if Saqlain had not been summoned to that epicentre of world cricket, Toronto. Without Saqlain to baffle opponents by looping the odd slower legbreak and turning the ball both ways, and Martin Bicknell when he was injured, Surrey slid from title contenders to the ordinary position of fifth.

No England-qualified offspinner had anything remotely like the success of Saqlain or Muralitharan. Leicestershire managed to win the Championship without one. Even those with some international experience – especially those with international experience – had a hard and lean summer, like Robert Croft, Shaun Udal and Neil Smith, as the accompanying table illustrates. The safest in their jobs were those like Paul Weekes or Vikram Solanki (or Carl Hooper), who mainly batted and only turned their hand to bowling when the moon was blue, and the month had an x or z in it, and the pitch was turning. Seasons past have always offered one field day for journeymen like Martyn Ball, but not this damp, seam-dominated summer: he worked his passage as a first slip and number-eight hitter as much as an offie.

Diminishing returns: between them Jim Laker, Pat Pocock and Peter Such have spanned nearly every season since 1945. But the game played by Laker has little in common with that played by Such

The one field day came at Wantage Road when Northamptonshire, with three offspinners on their books and another as coach, trapped Sussex on an underprepared `bunsen' and were docked 25 points. Jason Brown, who finished the season with the best figures of any England-qualified offspinner, and Graeme Swann, fresh from his triumph for England Under-19, took their chance, but so did Mike Denness and the ECB's pitches committee. The punishment had to be imposed, I suppose, but it makes any encouragement for finger-spinners still less likely next season. Even Peter Such had the least effective summer of his career, and was chosen for Australia on the strength of other evidence. Nobody would dispute Pat Pocock's assessment of him as `the best traditional offspinner we have had for a long time', and it was poor selection that did not send him to the West Indies in 1993–94. Yet this summer's work earned him only 38 first-class wickets at 38.81 apiece. Desperate stuff, and literally so: for any young offspinner will be tempted to despair and try something else.

 BETWEEN THE THREE of them Laker, Pocock and Such have spanned every first-class season since the Second World War, except for the two years between Laker's time as a Surrey pro and Essex amateur ( 1960 and'61). But there has been no continuum of experience in the course of this half-century. Quite the opposite: the game played by Laker seems to have as little in common with that played by Such last season as greyhound racing does with National Hunt. We are talking about different animals.

`Jim used to tell me,' Pocock remembers, `that in the first half of his career he would get half his wickets bowled through the gate, just by floating it up on or just outside off stump and turning it.' Oh, gloriously innocent times for an offspinner, blessed with such naive opposition! Batsmen coming forward to drive and being bowled, tailenders advancing to swipe and being stumped. Even so fine a batsman as Keith Miller batted at Old Trafford in 1956 as if the front pad never existed. And how many wickets does Such calculate that he obtains through the gate? `Four or five a season,' he says. Then pad-play, pioneered by Colin Cowdrey, M. J. K. Smith and Brian Bolus, became the norm. No more dolly catches to short leg from bats thrust ingenuously forward, from now on they were tucked behind the pad. Catches started to go to silly point rather than short leg– Such reckons he gets a 50-50 split – if they went anywhere at all. Last season, according to Such, some batsmen began to push bat in front of pad again, but it made little difference to his strike rate.

Padding it out: the offspinner's job was made harder by pad-play pioneers from top Colin Cowdrey, M. J. K. Smith and Brian Bolus

If defensive techniques against offspin have entirely changed in the last half-century, so has the attacking method. One day when Surrey were hosting Gloucestershire, Mike Procter picked up two good-length offbreaks and drilled them over extra cover for six. At the next interval Pocock went to Laker and asked: `How do you bowl against that, Jim?' The inside-out drive meant that both sides of the wicket had to be protected now. The stroke which Jim Parks had been virtually alone in playing was to become, through one-day cricket, as much a part of the common repertoire as heavy bats and tailenders who never give their wickets away as they used to do. Instead of `floating it up' all day and every day, the offspinner had to push it through two days a week and hit the top of the bat, preventing the wielder from advancing to drive.

 Such delivered his first offbreak at about the age of 12 in Nottinghamshire. `I wanted to be a quick bowler like everybody else but they matured a bit faster than me. It was my sports master – a decent club bowler – who encouraged me to bowl offspin in the nets, and the first one turned and bounced a bit so I thought it was a good thing. I bowled them in a game a couple of days later.' He progressed through his county's under-age teams, and Young England, to the Nottinghamshire side a few days after leaving school. He recalls his third game, at Cheltenham in 1982, even better than I do as he took five wickets in Gloucestershire's second innings and regularly made the ball bounce chest-high. Such says `I have never experienced anything like that again, except for the odd ball which has hit the foot-marks.' At the end of the season, Wisden purred: `His consistency of line and length belied his inexperience.'

And here is the nub of the problem, even more than the improvement in techniques. Pitches at county grounds have not turned and bounced for some time (except for that one at Northampton) because they have been dressed with Surrey loams and marls according to the recipe prescribed by the ECB's inspector of pitches, Harry Brind, who is only now retiring. Nothing wrong with the bounce, of course: Such wants to see those outside edges carrying to slip as much as any pace bowler, and they do, more so than in Pocock's day. But the pitches do not wear and they do not tear, only crack as the game goes on, when the uneven bounce is more use to the pace bowlers, like everything else. Local, natural, differences have been replaced by the one standard formula. And now out-grounds are going the same way. `To keep their match, they're leaving a bit more grass on and making them damper so the ball doesn't go through the top,' says Such, who used to have his field days at Southend and Colchester in two Championship games at each ground, before all matches became four-dayers.

 Such acknowledges `the sore point' that Essex's batting last season was seldom sufficient to take a Championship match into the fourth day, and they were not alone. From damp April to damp September, often on seamer-friendly relaid pitches, all too many counties thrashed away the moment they saw the ball moving around and were dismissed in 40 overs of hit-out or get-out. Often there was not enough application to judge whether techniques against seam or swing had improved or not. We may have 18 of the best sides in the world at scoring 170 off the last 20 overs on a flat pitch. When the ball is darting about, any hack medium-pacer can pick up 5 for 40 off ten overs and, as the national bowling averages showed, did so.

Some old-times would turn the clock back to uncovered pitches, but not Pocock. `For my first five years we had uncovered pitches, and the only thing it teaches you to do is to bowl out sides on wet pitches. The pace bowlers slowed down and put it there, the spinners fired it in to spin and pitch it, spin and pitch it. You would get an extra 20 wickets in those three or four games, and that was enough to get you on a tour to the West Indies, say, where a completely different technique was required.' Such thinks Peter Marron is on the right lines at Old Trafford, using the loam and marl for the middle of his pitches and letting Mother Nature have her say at the ends.

 OR MAYBE the answer does not lie in the soil so much as the air and fingers of the bowlers concerned. Australia's former offspinner Ashley Mallett has recently promulgated the idea of the `super-spinner', one who will bowl stock legspin on true pitches at right-handers, and off-breaks on turning pitches and at left-handers. Sonny Ramadhin, Johnny Gleeson and Saqlain have been prototypes. Muralitharan too has introduced the leg-break into his repertoire but it was mild milk at The Oval by comparison to his stock ball, which swerved, bounced and turned more like a googly than an offbreak. The super-spinner of finger-and wrist-spin, off-and legbreaks, preferably delivered without a discernible change of action: that is the challenge.

Or there is Arthur Mailey's view point, as expressed in Ten for 66 and All That, or in the Australian version of it, to be precise. It is strange, but the British and Australian editions of the book are by no means the same. The Australian one contains a chapter on Laker and offspin which, if it isn't disparaging, is the closest thing to it. In so many words, Mailey doesn't consider offspin to be much cop. Real spin bowling to him (and if anyone has turned a legbreak more than Shane Warne, it must have been Mailey) lies in ripping it both ways, as Mallett also would have spinners of the future do.

If we stand back and regard the evolution of cricket, there is some support for Mailey's view. The offbreak and offcutter were the most effective deliveries when pitches were poor and batting techniques no better: indeed no delivery was more so. No-one cleaned up more quickly than the likes of J. T. Hearne, Alf Shaw, William Attewell and Schofield Haigh. But as pitches and methods have improved, the offbreak has become less and less effective in Test cricket – save for Muralitharan– and in county cricket. The delivery remains valuable in one-day matches for being so controllable and economical, and batsmen who can turn their hand to it will always be valued. But the specialist offspinner of the future will have to be either original in some way, or else a big turner of the ball, or one who can turn in both ways. Darwin had no known connections with cricket other than that he attended the same Cambridge college as Gilbert Jessop and Reggie Schwarz, one of the quartet of South African googly bowlers. But I suspect he would now conclude that the orthodox offspinner has to adapt and evolve in order to survive.

A season to forget How each county's leading offspinner fared in'98

* CD Crowe ( Leics) and GP Swann ( Northants) also bowled offspin. Crowe's figures read 21–5–61–4; Swann's were 199.4–41–666–22

Lawrence Booth

County	Player	O	M	R	W	Avge	BB	5i	10m	SR
Derbys	SJ Lacey	88	19	274	4	68.50	2–89	—	—	132.00
Durham	NC Phillips	360.4	69	1037	23	45.08	5–56	1	—	94.00
Essex	P. M. Such	501	128	1394	38	36.68	5–73	2	—	79.10
Glam	R. D. B. Croft	352.5	91	895	19	47.10	4–76	—	—	111.40
Gloucs	MCJ Ball	390	95	1042	31	33.61	4–26	—	—	75.40
Hants	S. D. Udal	176.2	34	542	13	41.69	4–37	—	—	81.30
Kent	C. L. Hooper	386.2	104	957	31	30.87	7–93	1	—	74.70
Lancs	G Yates	131.3	26	432	18	24.00	4–64	—	—	43.80
Leics*	TJ Mason	45.2	9	139	0	—	—	—	—	—
Middx	PN Weekes	237	37	702	13	54.00	3–113	—	—	109.30
Northants*	JF Brown	280.2	68	726	33	22.00	6–53	4	1	50.90
Notts	RT Bates	21	2	98	0	—	—	—	—	—
Somerset	ARK Pierson	243.1	50	788	21	37.52	5–117	1	—	69.40
Surrey	Saqlain Mushtaq	475	136	1119	63	17.76	8–65	3	3	45.20
Sussex	JJ Bates	102.5	24	273	14	19.50	5–67	2	—	44.00
Warwicks	N. M. K. Smith	299.3	73	914	21	43.52	5–128	1	—	85.50
Worcs	V. S. Solanki	96	19	350	7	50.00	2–22	—	—	82.29
Yorks	JD Middlebrook	136.2	41	338	11	30.72	3–20	—	—	74.30

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