England played good cricket against the West Indies and it would be easy to undermine that by pointing to the quality of the opposition. It helps to play a side that crumbles when the going gets tough but you still have to create that situation and England did that consistently. Over the last couple of years there is a nice variety to their bowling where once there was only monotony. And now they have a spinner of serious quality in Monty Panesar. In fact in the last Test against the West Indies, they had a right hand swing bowler in Hoggard, a left arm swing bowler in Sidebottom, a fast bouncy quick in Harmison. And they had Monty.You can’t ignore him anymore and I sometimes wonder if a few early snubs have made him stronger. There’s a child in him, a still accepting child, that looks upon the game as a wondrous spectacle. The best performers are those that feel indebted to the game. Most slowly migrate towards a certain forgetfulness of the bounty that life has delivered to them. Panesar hasn’t got there yet and hopefully, he won’t for there is so much beauty in this game that still lies undiscovered to him. In course of time he will bowl slower, every time pitches and batsmen pull out a weapon to thwart him he will pull a subtle one of his own out of his larder.He is one of the game’s great sights now. A wonderful bowling action, strong fingers that spin the ball hard and as a result, a great ability to get drift towards leg stump. Only the best finger spinners can do that; drift it one way and then get it to turn the other. That way, Panesar is able to bowl a leg stump or a middle stump line to a right hander forcing him either to play against his considerable turn or move towards leg stump to play him inside out. The moment his line moves towards off stump, he will become half the bowler for batsmen can then drive him through cover or rock back and play the cut shot.As Warne departs, Murali remains an indefinable bowler, Kumble runs the last lap of a fine race and Harbhajan is delivered a little lesson from a great game, there are only two men left to showcase spin bowling. Neither is from the sub-continent. One, Daniel Vettori, lives in a country of such lush green grass that spin bowlers must feel alien. And the other now comes from a land where it was believed that spinners only emerged in end June. So where are the spinners from the sub-continent? Pakistan might point, with some justification, towards Danish Kaneria but there is little else.It means that batsmen from the sub-continent will no longer be the great players of spin bowling they once were. I often ask people who see more domestic cricket than I do if they have spotted an exciting young spinner and get the answer before it is spoken. That is why I think Panesar could be as much of a threat to India as Hoggard and Harmison. You must wonder why I say so given that this team has three of the most thrilling players of spin bowling I have seen in Tendulkar, Laxman and Ganguly. But with each of them the past tense grows more significant on this issue.The great threat of Shane Warne was negated by precise footwork; first from Tendulkar in Mumbai and Chennai, then by Sidhu and most artistically by Laxman. In 1998, Laxman used his feet beautifully to come to the pitch of the ball and drive through the on-side, even through mid-wicket sometimes. In 2001, he used the inside-out shot to the leg spinner better than anyone I have seen. But increasingly Laxman prefers to play from his crease as does Tendulkar. They push and glide rather that drive and loft and even Ganguly, the best destroyer of left arm spin I have seen, now only jumps out occasionally. If he is not attacked the spinner is free to bowl his length. It is when his length is questioned that the spinner is in strife.To my mind Ganguly remains India’s best counter to Panesar since it was clear that he was half the bowler to Chanderpaul than he was to the right handers (though you might argue that Chanderpaul was twice as good as any other West Indian batsman anyway!). It should be a good contest. But before we can rub our hands in glee there is the avoidable matter of some one-day cricket in Ireland!
