Kuldeep Yadav’s delivery to dismiss Zak Crawley was the ball of the series

Pigeons come home to roost, the fallibilities in a batsman’s technique become ever more exposed in a five-Test series, but it was still magnificent bowling by Kuldeep Yadav, and of a kind which English cricket has studiously avoided: left-arm wrist-spin.

Andy Flower, the former England head coach, tells a nice story against himself. He told it to me during the England nightmare tour of Australia in 2013-4, when Jonathan Trott had already flown home and Mitchell Johnson was bowling like nobody had – but it was still worth a laugh.

Flower was playing in the Lancashire League and coaching one evening. A young left-arm wrist-spinner turned up in the nets and started turning the ball square. “I advised him to switch to left-arm orthodox spin,” Flower said. “He could have been a millionaire by now!” For this was already the time when fortunes could be made in the Indian Premier League by an outlandish talent from nowhere.

Left-arm wrist-spin has been the rarest form of bowling, not in Trinidad and Adelaide, the two places where it has been relatively common, but unquestionably in England. And our game has been, and is, and will be the poorer for it until the few purveyors are encouraged.

The angles, for a start, are completely different from anything else in cricket. I will tell a very brief story against myself. I was recently batting (if you can call it that) against a left-arm wrist-spinner who was playing for his school in Gloucester and bowling over the wicket. First he bowled a full toss that was so high it was no-balled, then his stock ball landed, a couple of feet outside offstump – no exaggeration – and I was conditioned to shoulder arms, because that is what you used to do when you go in to bat and the ball is that wide. And it hit offstump.

Left-arm wrist-spin can work in England, at the highest level, it is just that nobody has given it a chance. Two Australians took over a thousand first-class wickets when representing English counties in the 1950s, George Tribe for Northamptonshire and Jack Walsh for Leicestershire. Yorkshire had an equally fine exponent in Johnny Wardle but he was not allowed to bowl it: he might bowl a long-hop, like the one which Kuldeep bowled to Joe Root who pulled it for four, and that would never do, conceding runs.

Wardle was allowed to switch from orthodox to unorthodox spin in the Sydney Test of the 1954-5 Ashes: England were 3-1 up, the rain-affected game was likely to be a draw, so Len Hutton thought there was not much to lose. Then Peter May allowed Wardle to bowl it in South Africa, where the home batsmen were not renowned for using their feet: on that tour Wardle took 90 – yes, ninety – first-class wickets.

The broadcaster’s statistician in Dharamsala came up with the statistic that Kuldeep was the first left-arm wrist-spinner from India to reach 50 Test wickets, and the third in all, after Paul Adams of South Africa and Wardle. But I suspect the Wardle stat involves some guess-work because a scorer in those days did not invariably record the mode of delivery, whether finger-spin or wrist-spin.

After Wardle retired – correction, after he was banned from county cricket for making disparaging comments about England in a newspaper – the only practitioner left was Donald Carr of Derbyshire, who was mainly a batsman, and who as the captain could bowl himself. From then until now there has been Jake Lintott, who has made a T20 career for himself but who, after trying almost every county in south-west England, starting with his native Somerset, has, at the age of 30, the grand total of two first-class matches to his name, for Warwickshire, and three wickets.

Yet Kuldeep’s delivery to dismiss Zak Crawley was surely the ball of this series, overtaking the yorker by Jasprit Bumrah that castled Ollie Pope’s stumps. It had everything – flight and fizz, dip and deception – before landing and gripping and ripping past Crawley’s inside edge to hit leg-stump. A ball of beauty in the trajectory it described.

The late Barry Jarman was a happy man, before he became an ICC match referee. In Adelaide “BJ” kept wicket for South Australia in the early 1960s when he had two left-arm wrist-spinners to take simultaneously: David Sincock, who could rip it not feet but yards, and a versatile all-rounder called Garfield Sobers. Jarman said Sincock turned the ball more and made it audibly fizz.

You may have noticed the nomenclature has changed. A ball by a left-arm spinner that pitched outside a right-hander’s offstump then turned in used to be known as a “Chinaman.” It was so called because one of the first exponents, who came from Trinidad where the matting pitches must have helped the ball grip, was Ellis Achong, of Chinese extraction, who bamboozled a few English batsmen on the West Indian tour of England in 1933.

Achong, who also played a lot in the Lancashire League and presumably did not discourage imitators, as Andy Flower was to do, died in 1986. I never met him but I met his daughter in Trinidad who was very proud that a type of delivery had been named after her father. Different times, different mores, and now it is called left-arm wrist-spin. But it must still be the most beautiful ball of all when bowled perfectly.

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