It might not be obvious at first glance, but Jack Leach is tough. His career has been built on confounding expectations and overcoming obstacles, many of which would have floored less tenacious characters. Still, he admits the assault he received from Rishabh Pant on the third day of England’s series in India left him shaken.
After his first six overs, Leach’s figures read 0-59. Of the 14 balls he bowled to Pant, five went to the boundary, including four which cleared the ropes. When Joe Root restored him to the attack a short while later, his next two overs were taken for 18, Pant again dispatching him over long-on.
In truth, Leach hadn’t bowled especially badly. With foot-holes formed outside his off stump, the left-handed Pant had decided attack was the best form of defence against the southpaw spinner and chanced his arm to brutal effect. But that did nothing to mask the horror of his figures. In his first Test in India, on a tour in which he was expected to spearhead England’s spin attack, Leach had leaked 77 runs from eight wicketless overs.
“That was really hard,” says Leach, speaking less than 24 hours after England completed a stirring win in the first Test at Chennai. “Losing your place because of illness is hard because you’re not getting the opportunity but, when you’re actually getting the opportunity and everyone is watching you get whacked out of the park, that becomes quite a difficult situation. I do have an understanding as a spinner that at times you’re going to get some treatment, but eight overs for 80 is tough to take. I certainly had tough times in that game. I’ve never found a Test match that hard. I did joke about the fact that I felt like I was playing my first IPL game in those first few overs.”
Pant’s blitz is the closest Leach will ever come to a taste of the IPL. Somerset’s left-arm spinner is an anomaly in that he has never played a professional T20 match. He has not even played a one-day match since 2016, something he says he hopes will change this season when The Hundred stretches his county’s playing staff.
It came as a shock, therefore, to have Pant repeatedly trying to launch him into the Bay of Bengal. But by stumps on day four he had produced the delivery of the match to set up England’s victory charge, castling Rohit Sharma with a classic left-arm spinner’s dismissal which drifted in late before turning sharply and knocking back off stump.
“I knew we were going to have a little bowl at the end of the day and it was about trying to make the most of the hardness of the new ball. It felt like the new ball would spin a bit more and be a bit quicker off the surface. When I was bowling my best in that game I was getting some drift and then the spin, so I was trying to draw the batsmen into playing a certain line and then beating them that way. I’m not going to lie, I wasn’t running up thinking about bowling that ball, but it’s one of them that when you let go you feel like it’s in a good place. To see the stumps light up was a nice feeling. I was happy with that one.”
For Peter Such, the ex-England spinner who worked with Leach during his time as the ECB’s lead spin bowling coach, it was simply “quality bowling from a quality bowler”.
“You’ve actually earned that by completely beating the batsman,” says Such. “The batsman’s not contributed towards the dismissal, it’s down to the excellence of the delivery. As a batsman it’s one of those balls where you walk off and say: ‘You know what, I played it as best as I could but it was just too good.’ That’s what you like as a bowler.”
Leach claimed three more the next morning, including the key early wicket of Cheteshwar Pujara, to take his overall tally to 50 in 12 Tests. No English spinner has reached the milestone in fewer matches since Jim Laker in 1952. Given the 29-year-old’s stop-start England career so far, it’s a quietly impressive haul.
It’s a career that took longer than it should have done to get started. Speaking recently on the Sky Sports Cricket Podcast, Graeme Swann divulged that he had been in Alastair Cook’s ear about giving Leach the chance to replicate his outstanding form for Somerset at international level as long as five years ago, only for the then England captain to offer a curious rebuttal. “I was championing for Jack Leach to be involved,” said Swann. “I couldn’t understand why Jack hadn’t been picked to go to Bangladesh and India [in 2016]. He just said: ‘Yeah, but he only takes his wickets on spinning pitches’. Which, I mean, don’t get me wrong, that’s what I want. I want my spinner to take wickets when it spins because they’re the ones who are more likely to cause problems when it’s not.”
Cook probably won’t thank his former teammate for that revelation but it’s indicative of a widely held view at that time that Leach’s wickets were somehow worth less because he was fortunate enough to play his home matches at a ground which offered something for the spinners.
“It was never what people billed it to be,” says Such of the pitch at Taunton. “In our game we’ve become anaesthetised to the ball seaming around. As soon as the ball goes off the straight from the spin bowler we panic. It’s a skill in itself taking wickets when conditions are in your favour, because you have to deal with the expectations. When you go to the subcontinent… then you’ve got to do the same thing. I think it’s been a great development opportunity for him.”
Leach’s opportunity with England was further delayed when, in the winter of 2016, soon after being overlooked for the tours of Bangladesh and India, routine testing at Loughborough revealed a kink in his bowling action. He was on holiday in Portugal when he received a phone call from Andy Flower to deliver the bad news. “I was pretty shocked. It’s not the news you want to hear.”
Finally, in March 2018, having remodelled his action, and with Root having replaced Cook as captain, Leach made his Test debut at Christchurch. In the time since he has been pivotal to a brace of series wins in Sri Lanka and enjoyed a productive 2019 Ashes series (12 wickets at 25.83), which was rather overshadowed by his own batting exploits, but the hurdles have kept on appearing.
Leach was hospitalised and dangerously ill after contracting sepsis during England’s tour of New Zealand in late 2019, and then forced to return home from the subsequent trip to South Africa after being badly affected by a sickness bug which swept through the camp. In hindsight, he wonders if he had Covid, a virus to which he is particularly vulnerable due to the immunosuppressants he takes to manage Crohn’s disease. At one stage, as the pandemic took hold, he questioned whether he would ever be able to play Test cricket again.
When he was finally fit to return, he watched from the sidelines for the entirety of the 2020 Test summer, usurped by his junior spin partner at Somerset, Dom Bess, who has since signed for Yorkshire.
This all meant that when he touched down in Sri Lanka earlier this year, he did so having bowled a total of 52 overs in 2020, a figure he surpassed in the first Test at Galle alone.
It makes his performances so far this winter – 22 wickets in four matches at the time of writing, including six in the second Test defeat at Chennai – all the more impressive. He has proven himself to be England’s most reliable and most threatening spinner, and Root’s faith in him – as demonstrated by the skipper continuing to toss him the ball when Pant was on the charge – has been rewarded. “Rooty has been brilliant,” confirms Leach. “I feel like we have a really good relationship and we’re not afraid to bounce ideas off each other.”
It’s a noticeable shift from the 2016 tour of India, when Cook struggled to effectively manage his three-pronged spin attack. “I think there was a sense that Cook didn’t fully understand in terms of rhythm and field settings what the spinners wanted,” says Zafar Ansari, who played two Tests in that series. “Spinners want seven or eight overs in a spell. Even if you’re going at three-and-a-half an over, you feel like you need that to have a chance out there, and it was difficult to get those overs.
“I think there was generally a feeling that there was a bit of a breakdown in communication sometimes. What you want, and what I think England have now got with Root, is someone who really backs the spinners that he has. And that’s not just in what he says, but in the way he uses them. That’s how you want to be treated as a spinner, and that’s heightened in India when the pressure’s on.”
For Such, the way English spinners are captained is representative of the country’s attitude towards spin in general. “Captaincy is a massive factor in how well a spinner performs and because we’ve not encouraged spin in our domestic game for a long period of time, to an extent we’ve lost certain attributes when it comes to captaining spin. Joe Root has been very good in the way that he’s captained spin bowlers. He’s also a spin bowler himself, so he understands spin bowling, and that’s a big part of it. He’s played a lot of cricket on the subcontinent, so he’s been around spin and been exposed to it, both as a batsman and captain.”
Leach has only featured in 14 of a possible 33 Test matches since making his debut but there is a sense now that he is carving out an identity for himself, separate to, or at least complementing, the cult-hero status he earned as the bespectacled sidekick at Headingley, Robin to Ben Stokes’ Batman.
“I thought I was going to get through a whole interview there without Headingley coming up!” he says with mock (or perhaps a hint of genuine) frustration as our conversation concludes with that unforgettable summer’s afternoon in 2019. “Obviously I have really good memories of that day so when people want to talk about it, that’s great. For me though, I pride myself on my bowling most of all. I know that if I’m bowling well, that’s what’s going to get me in the team in the first place.”
It’s taken too long for that to happen on a regular basis, but England are now finally recognising what Leach has to offer.
This is an article from Wisden Cricket Monthly. Subscribe to the digital edition of the magazine and pay just £9.99 for six issues.