He may be 43 in a fortnight, but age will not stop Gareth Batty, who is set to captain Surrey in their T20 quarter-final against Kent tomorrow.
Batty has seen it all in the English game since a county debut in 1997 but has the enthusiasm of a much younger man, and the body, too; he promptly overcame a hamstring injury to be available for the quarter-final and is still performing. As a Surrey player/coach, he has nine wickets and an economy of just 6.31 in 20 Vitality Blast overs this season.
It feels appropriate to listen to Batty’s thoughts on a day when England, for the second straight year, have announced a Test central contract list without any spinners, despite heading to Asia for two tours after Christmas.
Dom Bess and Jack Leach have increment deals and Moeen Ali and Adil Rashid have white-ball deals. But none of the 12 players with Test deals are spin bowlers and the team does not currently have a specialist spin bowling coach either. English long-form cricket has a spin-bowling a problem, as Graeme Swann recently articulated in an interview with the Observer.
“I think the biggest thing is we have to have a fractional mindset shift,” says Batty. “I’m not saying any club, but you can go up north and play on a green seamer and it finishes in two and a half days. The pitch doesn’t get reported, nobody says a bean, it’s all fine that the ball seams, swings, goes up and down, no problem.
“If a ball even looks like turning on the first day, people say it’s a rubbish wicket, it’s terrible. Until that changes, Swanny is bang on. Because you are literally saying you’re second class to the English swinging, seaming ball.”
Batty believes spinners are misunderstood in the English game.
“There needs to be a bit more understanding of what spinners go through because we are more delicate creatures than some of the others,” he says. “It’s a bit like a goalkeeper, he makes a bad error, generally you are on your own and you cop it. If a fast bowler does, there are two or three others. There are four or five others for batsmen. Quite often a spinner just cops it.
“That’s part of the game and we can’t be teaching spinners not to embrace that but it also needs more of a learning curve and understanding.
“I feel there’s been a lack of appreciation for spin at times. You only need to look at the top county teams, Simon Harmer and Jeetan Patel have helped their teams to the Championship. Good spin is not going anywhere.
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“For me, spin still has a huge part to play. In the world game, spin is going nowhere. We would be very naive and silly to think we don’t need to be producing spinners.”
Batty is encouraged by the two young spinners at Surrey, Amar Virdi (22) and Daniel Moriarty (21), who took 39 Bob Wills Trophy wickets despite playing just seven matches between them this season.
But he also believes that English cricket’s issues with spin bowling has seen the techniques of batsmen worsen.
“This will sound old man-y so I apologise,” he says, “but the way spin is played now from when I first started has changed. Then, they could hit you for four or six, move the field then manipulate you and hurt you all day. It was horrible, when you got some of those great players like [Rahul] Dravid he’d make you pay all day, it was horrible.
“Nowadays you might get pinged out the ground a few times, but then it’ll be smacked up in the air. I don’t think players are playing spin as well as they used to because they don’t face it as much, so they try to whack it out the ground. It’s a vicious circle.”