When I were a lad

[chickenfeet]

Spurred into action by jen_c_w's comment that the Wheeliebin is a "decent spinner" I consulted the archives and it just shows how low England's expectations of a test spinner have sunk, and how long they have stayed low. Ashley Giles average of 37.28 is comparable with recent England spinners such as Emburey (38.40) and Edmonds (34.18) but it's quite a bit worse than Ray Illingworth (31.20) and Fred Titmuss (32.22) and neither of them was considered deadly in his day. It's probably not fair to include Underwood (25.83) in the comparison for he probably would not have faired nearly so well on today's covered wickets so we have to go back to the 40s and 50s to find England spinners in the Warne/Murali class but we had a pair of them then in Jim Laker (21.24) and Tony Lock (25.58). What would Michael Vaughan not give to have those two later in the week at Old Trafford? It wasn't a fluke either as they were the last in a long line of very effective England spinners including Bosanquet (24.16), Wardle (20.39) and Verity (24.37).

Comments

[atpotch.livejournal.com]

Good points, though as ever I stick up rather bolshily for the modern spinner, on the grounds that comparing via average, though a very sensible mark of quality, should be seasoned with two considerations- firstly that the averages of Giles and the other spinners is liable to be higher merely for the reason that scoring rates are higher nowadays, and so strike rate would be another interesting statistic. Secondly that average scores in general have improved vastly in the last seventy years due to a succession of rules favouring batsmen.

This is not to say that Giles is as good a spinner as any of the others you mention, (though the fact he has a better average than Emburey is revelatory), I just want to even out the context slightly. Certainly you can't imagine Giles taking 19-90.

TCH

[blonde222.livejournal.com]

This debate is completely off the point. Giles is a more than decent bit of spinning eyecandy. So jen_c_w is right.