Lyon embodies off spin’s revival after death of the doosra

Nathan Lyon’s 500th Test wicket is a milestone for the man – and the art of spin.

Nathan Lyon in action on day four of the first Test against Pakistan in Perth. Picture: Getty Images

If the casual cricket supporter ­remembers the former Kent and Warwickshire off-spinner Alex Loudon, they are likely to do so for three reasons: first, he played, fleetingly, for England; second, he dated Kate Middleton’s sister, Pippa; and third, he bowled the “doosra”, an exotic delivery found mainly on the subcontinent rather than in county cricket.

It was the third rather than the second of those factors that influenced the first. When the final history of cricket is written, it is likely that the doosra will form an entertaining footnote. Translated as “the other one”, and turning from leg to off, the doosra was perfected first of all by the Pakistan off-spinner Saqlain Mushtaq and was in vogue for a few years in the 2000s.

It was said, commonly, that no off-spinner could succeed in international cricket unless they had this alternative piece of trickery.

It was this enthusiasm that brought Loudon his one ODI cap, in 2006.

The problem was that the doosra was fiendishly hard to bowl unless bowlers straightened their arm beyond the tolerance set by the ICC of 15 degrees (or unless bowled with a turn of the wrist, as by Muttiah Muralitharan). Almost as soon as it became flavour of the month, the ICC clamped down, fearing an epidemic of chucking.

In turn, various bowlers were stopped from using the doosra, sent for remedial work on their ­actions and suspended from ­bowling. A few years before this clampdown happened, Cricket Australia got ahead of the game, announcing that it would not be teaching the doosra to its young, emerging spinners. After a spin summit in Brisbane in 2009, former Australian off-spinner Ashley Mallett said: “There was unanimous agreement that the off spinner’s ‘other one’, the doosra, should not be coached in Australia.”

The spin summit was only in part to bring clarity to Australia’s approach to the doosra. It was also a response to the struggles of those who followed the great Shane Warne, who had retired from international cricket in 2007. Spin in Australia was in crisis, as highlighted during the Ashes series to follow in 2010-11, when England’s batsmen feasted on the bland offerings of Xavier Doherty and ­Michael Beer.

It was around this time that a stick-like, thinning-on-top, rather unassuming-looking off-spinner called Nathan Lyon was making his way for the Capital Territory XI, before moving to Adelaide. His first club match for Prospect in grade cricket in Adelaide revealed him playing alongside Joe Root in 2010. From South Australia he moved to NSW; he made his Test debut in 2011, snaffling a wicket with his first ball, and there he has remained virtually ever since, this week taking his 500th Test wicket and becoming only the eighth bowler to reach that milestone and the first finger spinner ­(although an off-spinner, Murali should really be counted as a wrist spinner because he propelled the ball from wrist rather than finger).

If the clarity around the doosra in Australia, Warne’s retirement and the desire to settle on a more permanent successor made it a favourable time to be starting out as a talented spinner, then another factor was even more influential. Trialled in 2008, the Decision Review System was introduced formally by the ICC a year later and it was this, above all, that acted as a counterbalance to the ­banning of the doosra in the see-sawing balance between bat and ball.

DRS helped bring the orthodox finger spinner back into the game for a number of reasons. Umpires began to realise more balls were hitting the stumps than previously thought, so became more trigger happy.

Because of that, and because bowlers had the option to review, batsmen had to play with bat and not pad ­(previously they could hedge their bets by thrusting the pad at the line of the ball), meaning the finger spinner (who generally turns it less than a wrist spinner) did not have to spin it as far to beat the bat.

The statistics are conclusive, with the percentage of leg-before dismissals to spinners increasing markedly since the introduction of DRS. Despite playing on bouncy Australian pitches and despite using a good deal of overspin (thus getting more bounce), Lyon has taken almost 15 per cent of his wickets this way.

The best Australian off-spinner immediately before Lyon’s emergence was Tim May, who took 8 per cent of his wickets leg-before.

Set against these advantages, though, was the sheer difficulty of succeeding as a finger spinner in Australia, where the most significant gains have been traditionally realised by wrist spin.

Before Lyon’s emergence, no off-spinner had taken more than Hugh Trumble’s 141 Test wickets and only four of them (Bruce Yardley, Ian Johnson, Trumble and Mallet) had taken more than 100. The leg spinners Richie Benaud, Stuart MacGill, Clarrie Grimmett and Warne all took more than 200 Test wickets.

More than that, off-spinners from the rest of the world, who played in the same era as Lyon, have struggled terribly.

Graeme Swann took 22 ­wickets in Australia at an average of 53; Ravichandran Ashwin has taken 39 at an average of 42 and Moeen Ali five wickets at an eye-watering 115 apiece.

Murali, by the way, took seven wickets at 106 in Tests for Sri Lanka in Australia, to highlight the difficulties for off-spinners there.

Lyon’s central importance was highlighted during the most recent Ashes, when, becoming the first bowler to play 100 consecutive Tests, he duly ripped a calf and hobbled out of the picture.

It was, perhaps, the most consequential moment of the series and the Australia attack never quite functioned as a whole after that. It has not just been the wickets Lyon has taken, rather those he has enabled for the quicker bowlers at the other end as well. Ploughing both a defensive and an attacking furrow, Lyon has been, arguably, the most important cog in the wheel.

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