Dom Bess can solve England’s spin bowling problem
MUCH has been written about who should be the next cab off the rank for England as an opening batsman; less so about who their next spin bowler should be.
One man who is advancing his claims in the latter respect is Yorkshire’s Dom Bess, who has started the season in a way that suggests he should be seriously considered for the forthcoming Test matches.
It is five years since Bess made the last of his 14 Test appearances, which brought him 36 wickets at an average of 33.97.
Now 28, he is a better bowler now than he was back then, and with England struggling to find a frontline spinner, having apparently gone off Shoaib Bashir and turned to Will Jacks’s part-time offerings during the Ashes, they could do much worse than go back to Bess, who is seemingly going from strength to strength.
Only four men have taken more wickets this season in Division One of the County Championship than Bess, who has collected 15 in four games at a time of the year not exactly conducive to purveyors of his craft.
Henry Crocombe, the highly-rated Sussex pace bowler, has 17 wickets - as has the Leicestershire seamer Ben Green and the Glamorgan leg-spinner Mason Crane, with the Hampshire fast bowler Kyle Abbott on 16 (ten of those in his side’s win against Yorkshire at Headingley last month).
Crane, five months older than Bess, will also have hopes of an England recall, more than eight years after his solitary Test appearance against Australia in Sydney. There is certainly much to admire also about a man who showed his class with eight wickets against Yorkshire in the opening match of the season in Cardiff, a game in which Bess claimed seven scalps himself.
Crane also showed his skill with the bat when striking a career-best 99 against Leicestershire at Cardiff a couple of weeks back, but he does not have Bess’s batting talent - good enough to have brought Bess two first-class hundreds and also a Test fifty on debut against Pakistan at Lord’s in 2018, while there are few finer fielders than Bess on the circuit.
Rehan Ahmed, the Leicestershire leg-spinner, and Liam Patterson-White, the Nottinghamshire left-arm spinner, are among the others who will deservedly have their supporters but, as an all-round package who can both attack with the ball, hold down an end, bat well and field brilliantly, Bess tick all boxes and plenty more besides.
Throw in the character of the man - a team player in every sense and one with a good cricket brain who has led Yorkshire so well in the One-Day Cup - and it would be a brave or foolish England selection panel that overlooked his credentials.
There is certainly no harm in going back to a player just because he has been tried in the past and then lost his place.
Indeed, there are countless examples of players maturing as they get older and especially spinners, who do not usually approach finished article territory until they reach Bess’s age and indeed much older.
It is ironic, as England now scratch around again for another opening batsman, that one of the finest in England, Yorkshire’s Adam Lyth, was never given the opportunity to add to his seven Test caps in 2014.
Surely Lyth deserved another opportunity at some point along the way and it would be a shame if a similar mistake was now made with Bess.
On the evidence of what we have seen so far this season, there is no reason why Bess could not make a better fist of international cricket second time around - not that he made a poor one the first time.
At Taunton this week, he played a key role in Yorkshire’s fine comeback victory against Somerset on his old stomping ground. His contribution of 40 from the No 9 position in the second innings helped to ensure that Somerset were left with a tricky target of 260 from a minimum of 92 overs, and then he proved just how tricky it was by taking 4-60 from 24.2 overs - well-supported by Joe Root, who took 4-49 from 16 overs.
After George Hill’s outstanding display first up with the ball, Bess and Root closed out the match in expert style.
Bess also got rid of three of Somerset’s most important batsmen - his great mate Tom Abell, the home team’s captain, plus first innings centurion Josh Thomas and the emerging James Rew; key breakthroughs all.
Perhaps Bess’s greatest attribute is his adaptability. He can do a job on the flattest of pitches by drying up the run-rate, and he can rip the ball with the best of them on surfaces that offer spinners assistance.
He has the ability to vary his pace depending on conditions and the demands of the situation, and he has a very fine temperament as all spinners must - not least in these days when so much appears to be in favour of batsmen.
There is much to admire.