Fizzle of Shoaib Bashir’s algorithmic magic echoes wider decline of Test spin

Left out of squad to tour South Africa, spin bowler’s exclusion points to a sport reshaped by the needs of T20 and hard data

During the summer, Sky Sports would frequently run an advert for one of English cricket’s blue-chip financial sponsors. I forget its exact name – something like WXYZ Tradify or Crypto Max 301 or Wealth Centaur would be my guess. But I remember there was a mind-shreddingly banal male voiceover (“diversify your forex contingents and start making your money bleed today”), to which England players like Harry Brook and Jacob Bethell were depicted engaging in various feats of staged cricketing heroism. Right up until the moment Shoaib Bashir steps up to bowl.

Bashir delivers his trademark off-break with that famously high release point. Upon which Bethell steps down the track and smashes the Wealth Centaur-branded ball back past his face, smashing a hole in the CGI wall and sending it into a hail of digital rain. Poor Shoaib. A passenger in the Ashes, sidelined for most of the home Test series, and now even getting clouted in the ad breaks. And in retrospect that was the point when we should all have realised that one English cricket’s weirder recent Test careers was already on borrowed time.

“He’s only 22,” Marcus North insisted this week, arguing Bashir remained a treasured asset despite being left out of the squad to tour South Africa. North went on to explain that with two off-spinning batters in the squad, they wanted to “balance” the lineup with a spinner who could (theoretically, in the case of the reliable but limited Liam Patterson-White) take the ball away from the right-hander. Presumably this was intended as some kind of reassurance, the revelation that the job of England’s No 1 red-ball spinner is now to dovetail with Dan Lawrence. In reality, it was as resounding a vote of confidence as the fact that England’s national selector doesn’t appear to know Bashir’s age. He’s actually 23.

Most likely Bashir will be back in some form, probably on the two-match tour of Bangladesh in February. But his omission has formalised what we basically already knew for a while: that he is essentially a locum, a fringe presence, a luxury player, a squad-packer. For most of the last year he was always getting dropped without ever really being dropped. Now he has been dropped for real, and something more abstract appears to have been followed him out of the door: an idea, an archetype, perhaps even an entire kind of cricketer, and perhaps for good.

To elaborate: Bashir doesn’t really bat. He performs no specific function in the field (although his ground skills are fine). He plays barely any meaningful white-ball cricket. This is, in short, a player whose entire worth as an athlete is wrapped up in a single discipline: a spinning red ball, craft and dip, long spells, men around the bat. Will the market allow something this radical to survive?

Partly this is a new spin on a very old problem. Spin bowling has been dying for almost as long as it has been alive. Covered pitches were supposed to kill it. Then the reverse sweep. Then one-day cricket. Then big bats.

But there are acute short-term factors at work here too. A quarter of Tests this decade were over in three days. Fewer than half reach a fifth day, when surfaces are most spin-friendly. The World Test Championship has generated more result pitches and forced all sides to prioritise pace, given the necessity of winning series outside Asia. Sri Lanka are currently playing a Test in Pakistan without a single specialist spinner. In January, Australia went into the Sydney Test without a spinner for the first time since the 1880s.

Wrist spin and mystery spin have basically disappeared from five-day cricket, given the disproportionately higher yields available in Twenty20. Even the reliable all-surface spinner is quickly passing into obsolescence. Nathan Lyon is no longer guaranteed a game for Australia. Nor Kuldeep Yadav, India’s best spinner. Ajaz Patel bowled New Zealand to victory in India two years ago and has played one Test since then. Will Jacks was the most-used spinner in the last men’s Ashes.

You probably already know, or at least intuit, most of this. In the same way that Bazball was a quixotic response to the imagined decline of Test cricket, Bashir’s selection was its attempt to game the spin bowling market by subverting the market entirely. A selection based on vibes, hunches, silhouettes, a juvenile disdain for county cricket, the serendipity of Ben Stokes happening to come across Bashir’s bowling while scrolling social media, and spotting an opportunity to make himself look like an absolute legend.

It was a lovely human story. We all wanted it to work. But with apologies to Bashir, it’s probably for the best that it did not. What would it have taught us about selection, about the talent pathway, about meritocracy, about the very craft of spin bowling itself? No shade on Bashir here, a wholehearted competitor who never went wicketless in a Test (apart from the two where he didn’t bowl at all) and ended up delivering more Bazball overs than anyone else: Stokes, Gus Atkinson, James Anderson, the lot. There remains a real talent in there, and it deserved to be nurtured: not plucked off the algorithm, thrown into battle half-baked, and then gradually discarded over the course of two years.

But then this is how English cricket has always treated its spinners: as a kind of outsider class, lightly understood and permanently disposable. Mohammad Abbas is a genius for getting the most out of a seaming wicket, but Jack Leach only gets wickets because he plays at Taunton. The teenager Farhan Ahmed, who Graeme Swann reckons has the potential to be a world-class spinner “for the next 15 years”, hasn’t played a Championship game for Nottinghamshire since July 2025. But of course, his teammate Patterson-White can bat. He’s useful. He goes great with Dan Lawrence.

Test match spin bowling demands time and patience and investment, a specialist role with specialist expertise and specialist coaching techniques. Where does this fit into a global game spinning ever more furiously around the gravitational pole of Indian T20 money? Perhaps ultimately red-ball spin bowling will go the way of wicketkeeping: a secondary skill, a string to the bow, selected above all on batting ability, wheeled out only in strictly delineated scenarios, like an NFL long snapper.

Cricket revolves around T20, and T20 revolves around data, and data will inevitably value what is easy to measure (runs) over what is hard. The ability to build pressure. Variety of tempo and angle. Extra rest for pace bowlers. Lower susceptibility to injury. The richness of the spectacle. The parabolic, Newtonian beauty of a perfectly spun cricket ball.

None of this will be of much comfort to Bashir right now, who may still hold an England central contract but whose long-term career prospects appear to be diminishing with every passing season. We hear a lot these days about robots taking jobs, and perhaps the only difference here is that the robots are able to bowl 60mph darts into the pitch, hold up an end, make a handy 30 batting at No 8, get picked up by the franchises. After all, you can argue with the future. But there’s no guarantee it’s listening.