What England wouldn’t give for Nathan Lyon

Jack Leach’s sufferings underline the consistent excellence of his counterpart Nathan Lyon, who will take the field on his favourite Australian ground

Nathan Lyon prepares for a Test match at his favourite Australian ground

Spare a thought for Jack Leach. He is 30, on his first Ashes tour. In Brisbane, he made his first-class debut on Australian soil, at the expense of one of England’s very greatest fast bowlers. You know the rest. Just as Rory Burns is first-ball dude, Leach is got-slogged guy.

Nobody expected Leach to rag it square down under, but it was hoped he would at least bowl tidily enough to help England meet its daily over rate quota. When cost confined his use to 13 overs at the Gabba, Joe Root’s team were penalised five World Test Championship points and docked their whole match fee. At this rate, they’ll be laying claim to amateur status by summer’s end.

With the possible exception of Ben Stokes, no one has been so exposed by the “all-right-on-the-night” inadequacy of England’s preparation.

Leach did not play a Test in the northern summer. In the lead-up to the Gabba, he described part of his routine: “I mean, I’m not shy of bowling in my hotel room, in front of the mirror. There’s been a little bit of that and yeah, so I mean, I’ve got in as much as I can.” Your getting turn off the mini-bar is hardly predictive of peak performance.

In hindsight, of course, everything is inevitable, but there were warning signs. Leach’s first-class record is strongly weighted towards excellent performance against right-handers on turning pitches — his home ground of Taunton is really county cricket’s only certified bunsen.

A greenish pitch and four lefties in Australia’s top seven, then, boded ill, and Leach’s task became impossible once his first three overs vanished for 31. By the time he returned, Australia was in the lead. His analysis, swelled by overthrows, concluded with a couple of demoralised leg-side long-hops.

Was it the difference between the teams? Of course not. It is a truism that fast bowling is the key to winning the Ashes. A corollary is that slow bowling, save when in the hands of Shane Warne, generally isn’t.

What Leach’s sufferings did do, however, was underline the consistent excellence of his counterpart Nathan Lyon, who will take the field on Thursday on his favourite Australian ground (51 wickets in 10 Tests at 26.9).

Lyon came into the Brisbane Test under some pressure, albeit perhaps more internal than external. Everyone, of courses, falls under Warne’s roving searchlight of disapproval every so often. But Lyon, one senses, suffers more by his own expectations than most.

When he is searching for wickets, Lyon can start looking predictable — a little like a duck going round a shooting gallery, ball following ball, all a little alike.

Success came on that fourth morning at the Gabba when Lyon mixed it up and slowed it down, with a silly point and an aggressive mien, to take four wickets in 50 balls for 20 runs on a pitch offering little sidespin.

Yet even when wickets are elusive for Lyon, he is never other than tidy, which, in a country traditionally unkind to finger spin, is priceless.

In his decade as Australia’s solo spinner at home, he has taken 204 wickets at 33 and cost 2.9 runs per over.

Leach is just the latest addition to the group of slow bowlers out bowled by Lyon, their wickets in the same 53 Tests adding up to 180 at 63 — a remarkable head-to-heads comparison.

Yet Lyon’s value goes further, I think. He has never missed a Test with injury and, at 34, has probably never been fitter.

If not always dearly, he sells his wicket seriously, and has been a serviceable nightwatchman.

He is spry in the field: in the corresponding Test four years earlier it was his run-out of James Vince that put the skids under England.

Above all, he needs no protection, no extra consideration. He can do a job anywhere and with anything, even with the pink ball he will be using in Adelaide, with which he has taken 29 wickets at 27.4.

For the support of Leach and his understudy Dom Bess on this tour, England have brought Jeetan Patel as spin bowling coach. Consultations with John Davison aside, Lyon has been almost his own instructor: imagine the brainspace that Lyon has saved selectors, coaches, captains over the years by his earthy reliability and self-sufficiency.

That costly over rate breach at Melbourne a year ago, moreover, has been one of only a handful by Australia in the last 10 years — something else their spinner has saved them worrying about.

Leach should not feel so disconsolate. In some ways he has simply met the low expectations held for English spin in these climes. In the past four decades of Ashes in Australia, visiting slow bowlers have paid about 50 runs per wicket.

Still it’s no fluke that in England’s two winning series of that time, 1986-7, involving Phil Edmonds and John Emburey, and 2010-11, featuring Graeme Swann, that cost fell to 37 per wicket and 2.2 an over. Pace won those series but spin helped England control them. For as long as England’s cricket system can produce no better than a Leach and a Bess, the urn will be hard to budge from hereabouts.

Pat Cummins is now the fifth Australian captain to whom Lyon has offered such a sense of control and continuity. In Brisbane, he showed him a corresponding degree of confidence, making Lyon’s search of his 400th wicket the subject of a joke. If ever Australia should undervalue their spinner, they need only consider the plight of his rival.