Stanford spins to win

Dave Mohammed was the most successful bowler in this year's Stanford 20/20

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These days, it’s a safe bet that there’s far more spin in the corridors of British policymaking than there is in the West Indies cricket team.

But could the onset of Twenty20, and more specifically Sir Allen Stanford’s Stanford 20/20 formula, lead to an upsurge of young spinners in the Caribbean?

On the evidence of the opening Stanford Super Series match in Antigua on Saturday night, the suggestion is not as fanciful as it sounds.

A touch of perspective is needed. West Indies have not produced a genuinely great spinner since Lance Gibbs, who retired his impossibly bruised and battered off-spinning fingers in 1976.

Twenty-six years earlier, two contrasting spinners, Sonny Ramadhin, a googly bowler and orphan from Trinidad, and left-armer Alf Valentine, a bespectacled Jamaican, so left the English batsmen in tatters that they took an astonishing 59 wickets in four Tests. And that was without the hatfuls of wickets they took in the tour games.

Up until the late 1970s, it was every bit as common for West Indies to field two spinners as it was for Pakistan to do so. Then Clive Lloyd decided that he would field four fast bowlers, as a result of being thrashed at the hands of Australia's pace quartet.

The pace formula was thus the basis for two decades of world domination.

In Saturday night’s match, 10 of Trinidad & Tobago’s 20 overs were bowled by spinners. When the Stanford Superstars came to bowl, Sulieman Benn took 2-14 from four overs and Dave Mohammed 1-29.

Benn, a tall man with long fingers, has a particularly dangerous quicker ball.

Mohammed was by far and away the most successful bowler in the recent domestic Stanford 20/20 tournament, which of course, T&T won.

What chance the emergence of a Lance Gibbs for the 21st century as alternative to non-stop pace?

Furthermore, in Twenty20 Daren Ganga has made a habit of opening the bowling with his leg-spinner, Samuel Badree, harking back to the days when New Zealand would open the bowling in one-day cricket with another non-turning spinner, Dipak Patel.

Critics will ask why Mohammed’s Test bowling average sits at 51, while his chinaman deliveries tie West Indies players in knots. People will question the average West Indies players’ capacity to play spin.

Amit Jaggernauth, who is in the Trinidad & Tobago squad, had a visceral campaign backing him to be picked by West Indies on the back of a formidable domestic record. He proceeded to take one wicket for 96 runs against Australia at Sabina Park, and could yet conceivably join the list of one-cap wonders.

But then again, there is the case of Ramnaresh Sarwan. This is a batsman who was so commanding against spin that he was picking Muttiah Muralitharan out of the hand when Sri Lanka visited the West Indies earlier this year. In the two Tests, Sarwan scored 80, 72, 57 and 102. How many Test players can claim to have Murali's number?

Yet the Guyana batsman was defeated by Badree’s googly first ball in the opening Stanford game.

Ultimately, if Twenty20 can produce quality spinners, the sort that can test batsman in longer forms of the game rather than when they are trying to cart every ball, surely that would be a promising development?

In turn, more good spinners would improve the proficiency of Caribbean batsmen against spin. West Indies had some of the finest players of spin the game has known. Sir Viv Richards took runs for fun off Bedi, Chandrasekhar, Prasanna and Venkat.

As we have seen in India, a quality spinner should be a prerequisite for any aspiring national team. If West Indies can unearth one on the back of the Stanford venture, that would be an unexpected fillip.