Spin no longer king as Dan Moriarty’s move to Yorkshire CCC highlights - Chris Waters

I must confess I wasn’t quite sure, but what I discovered took me by surprise.

The answer, basically, was nobody.

Or at least nobody who could be called a frontline spinner.

In fact, remarkable as it is to relate, Surrey are 23 points clear at the top of the County Championship – well on the way to retaining the title – despite having taken only seven wickets with spin in this year’s competition.

Five of those were captured by Will Jacks, a batsman who sometimes bowls off-spin; one by Cameron Steel, a batsman who sometimes bowls leg-spin, and the other by Moriarty on his sole appearance against Kent at Canterbury in June.

Instead, for the wickets that have contributed to seven wins in 11 games, Surrey have been overwhelmingly indebted to pace men Jordan Clark (41), Dan Worrall (38), Sean Abbott (37) and Tom Lawes (27), with assistance from Gus Atkinson, Kemar Roach, Jamie Overton and Sam Curran.

Amar Virdi, the off-spinner who was ever-present when Surrey won the title in 2018, has not played a Championship game for the club for nearly two years and could soon be leaving.

All of which seems, with no disrespect to Surrey, a sad and depressing state of affairs.

When they won the title last year, only 31 wickets fell to spin – Jacks taking 17, Steel nine and Moriarty five, still an improvement on this season’s haul.

The pitches at the Oval have favoured pace, and Surrey have the arsenal to exploit them, but spinners need agreeable surfaces, supportive captains and, in this era of free-swinging batsmen, nerves of steel as well as skill.

With Championship matches increasingly played at the start and end of the season, to free up room for white-ball cricket, spinners rarely have optimum conditions.

Indeed, there was no starker illustration of the bare nature of England’s spin bowling stocks than the fact that Moeen Ali had to be coaxed out of retirement to play in the Ashes, an unashamedly desperate move.

Granted, England could have thrown leg-spinner Rehan Ahmed into the fray, who, like Jacks, made his Test debut last winter.

But they clearly had insufficient confidence in Ahmed, who has taken just six wickets in eight games for Leicestershire in Division Two of this year’s Championship at an average of 67.66 and is still learning, while Moeen offered more than Jacks as an all-round package.

Others, including Yorkshire’s Dom Bess, along with Matt Parkinson and Mason Crane, have rather dropped off the England radar, with Liam Dawson perhaps the only other viable candidate once Jack Leach got injured. So, just seven wickets to spin for the side top of the Championship heading into September? It is, when you think about it, an incredible statistic.

Not so long ago, a good spinner would have been essential to a title challenge – not least at Surrey, where during a golden run of three titles in four years around the turn of the millennium, spinners were very much to the fore.

In 1999, the first year in that sequence, Ian Salisbury (60), Saqlain Mushtaq (58) and Rupesh Amin (9) shared 127 wickets. In 2000, Saqlain (66), Salisbury (52) and Ali Brown (1) supplied 119 wickets and, in 2002, Saqlain (53), Salisbury (37), Mushtaq Ahmed (8) and Nadeem Shahid (1) contributed 99.

When Yorkshire interrupted that sequence by winning the Championship in 2001, Richard Dawson (30), Darren Lehmann (12), Andy Gray (10), Michael Vaughan (7), James Middlebrook (5) and Ian Fisher (1) shared 65 wickets.

Going back to Yorkshire’s previous title in 1968, leading spinners Don Wilson (102), Ray Illingworth (86) and Geoff Cope (20) shared 208 wickets, while, even further back, when Yorkshire won the title in the final season before the Second World War, Hedley Verity (165) and Ellis Robinson (102) shared 267 wickets in days when much more first-class cricket was played – and on uncovered pitches to boot.

Even when Yorkshire had their great success in the mid-2010s, winning the title in 2014, 2015 and so nearly in 2016, spin played its part, albeit decreasingly so.

In 2014, 62 wickets materialised as Adil Rashid’s 46 was supplemented by five from Adam Lyth and from Kane Williamson, three from Karl Carver and one each from Azeem Rafiq, Joe Root and Aaron Finch.

In 2015, there were 54 wickets as Rashid took 29, Middlebrook 17, and Lyth and Glenn Maxwell four apiece; and, in 2016, 48 wickets as Rashid bagged 32, Lyth seven, Rafiq three and Root, Williamson and Alex Lees two apiece.

How times have changed for the poor old spinners – and not for the better.