It's time to talk about England's usage of Jack Leach

More of a match-up discussion than you'd think

I was fortunate enough to have one of the best seats in the house for Moeen Ali’s brutal take-down of Graeme White at Edgbaston in The Hundred in the summer. The over, in case you missed it, went six/wide/wide/six/six/four/wide/one, a total of 26 runs from a five ball over. If Moeen had hit a six from the final ball of the over, the over would have cost 31, meaning that there would have been over six runs per ball average in the over.

From a test match perspective, Australia’s treatment of Jack Leach in the first Test of the Ashes last week was pretty comparable, with Leach’s bowling going for almost eight an over in a Test match. Travis Head and Marnus Labuschagne took him for double digits per over in their individual battles.

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As a data-driven analyst, you know when there are good and bad match-ups in matches. White to Moeen was a bad match-up for Welsh Fire. And so was Jack Leach against a lot of the Australia top order. Most casual observers (and also, some more seasoned viewers - who often have great reach in the media) might blame the bowlers for being smashed around, but actually I frequently have the opposite point of view - it’s a strategic error often committed by management (captain, coach, maybe even analyst) and the player is simply (and often unfairly) asked to perform a role where they have a low chance of succeeding before they even start to try to perform that role.

The obvious reason is that Australia have four left-handers in their top seven and Leach, as a left-arm spinner, matches up worse against left-handers than right-handers. This isn’t Leach’s fault in the slightest - it’s extremely typical for left-arm spinners, who generally turn the ball into the left-hander and away from the right-hander. Some people think that match-ups are less relevant in Tests than T20, and while they aren’t as critical from a ball by ball, or even over by over perspective, they are still clearly critical in Test cricket from an advance planning point of view.

A secondary reason is that spinners don’t have a great record at The Gabba, the venue of the first Test, and you can add to that the predicted rainy conditions as well, which gave a greater chance of rest periods for their pace bowlers. Being blunt, it doesn’t take Einstein to work out that if you’re asking a left-arm spinner to bowl at a load of left-handers at a venue which generally doesn’t benefit spinners much, it probably isn’t going to end well.

However, before I go on to talk more about that, I want to run through some basic data to illustrate the above points, because it’s important to show why Leach shouldn’t have played in the match. I want to re-iterate here that my point of view is that Leach shouldn’t have played in the match, but not because he is a bad player (I actually think he’s pretty good when used in the right circumstances, as we’ll go on to discuss) but because conditions and opposition dynamics gave him a low chance of success.

First up, a chart to show that Leach is very good, in fact probably even better than that, when he’s asked to perform the role which he should be in the team for - as a strong match-up option against right-handed batters. 15 left-arm spinners have bowled at least 200 overs in Test cricket from the start of 2016 until today, and their records against their primary match-up (right-handed batters) are shown below (I took Axar Patel’s record out of the chart because it’s a fairly small sample compared to most, and because it’s ridiculously good and skews everything):-

Leach is firmly placed in the ideal bottom-left corner (low average, low economy) showing that he’s been one of the best left-arm spinners in recent years against their primary match-up versus right-handers. He’s actually averaging lower than Ravindra Jadeja, which is quite something. When you factor in that he’s often bowling in far more unhelpful conditions compared to those spinners whose home venue is in the subcontinent, there can be little debate that Leach is a top-level left-arm spinner against right-handers.

Leach’s issue primarily comes against his more unfavourable match-up - left-handers. Leach has the worst average and worst economy against lefties out of all the left-arm spinners in this sample, and it’s by a pretty reasonable distance as well. At the moment, my view of him is that he should only play when there are minimum five right-handers in the opposition top seven, as a specialist match-up spinner, and I’m pretty sure that if England utilised him in this way, he’d do pretty well.

Saying that, if I was able to, I’d be asking questions of the England management, including spin coach Jeetan Patel, as to what work they are doing with Leach to improve his output against left-handers.

However, in this particular match the problem was that Australia had four left-handers in their top seven. Add into the mix that all of the three major spin types averaged in excess of 40 runs per wicket at The Gabba from the start of 2010 to the start of the first Test, and again, it doesn’t take Einstein to envisage that it’s not likely to end well for Leach in this particular match.

The beauty of data is that a great deal of the time, it can be used to pretty reliably inform pre-match planning. We know, for example, that the pitch at The Gabba is highly unlikely to turn into a rank turner. Furthermore, England were extremely fortunate that Australia quite bizarrely announced their team about a week before the match - so they knew that Australia would have four left-handers in their top seven well in advance.

So what on earth were Joe Root and Chris Silverwood thinking when they picked Leach? I don’t know, and as they don’t usually give rationale to the media for selection decisions either, we are simply guessing here. But based on logic and data, it looks a poor selection. Most of the media have framed it as a Leach versus Broad or Anderson selection decision, but I’d have gone with Craig Overton ahead of Leach as well - the case for no Leach at this venue against this particular opposition is that clear, in my view. This isn’t hindsight either, as many of the dissenters are accused of - I’ve written for years about England not needing to pick a specialist spinner as much as they do, and about Leach/Bess/Root’s spin usage before as well - plus have discussed this numerous times on The Cricket Podcast.

To compound their error even further, England bowled 62% of Leach’s balls in the first Test to left-handers. Putting this into some sort of relatable context, of the 15 left-arm spinners bowling 200+ overs from 2016 onwards, the two bowlers bowling the highest percentage of their balls to left-handers were Keshav Majaraj and Ravindra Jadeja, at around the 32-33% mark - and both are two of the better bowlers against lefties as well, so it’s not so much of an issue. Leach’s usage in the first Test was almost double this 32-33% figure, so not only was he picked in a match where he was unlikely to succeed, he was also used at stages where he was unlikely to succeed. I genuinely feel extremely sorry for him, and in my view, Root and Silverwood have questions to answer in this area.

I don’t have any evidence of this, but I have a suspicion that England simply view whoever they pick as a spinner as their ‘best spinner’, regardless of match-ups. For example, Dominic Bess, who has the reverse match-ups as an off-spinner, was similarly misused against a right-hander heavy West Indies team last summer. Unfortunately, the game has moved on from that kind of basic thinking, and England have to go far more ‘horses for courses’.

However, picking Bess for the second Test would also be likely to be a mistake. His record is better than fellow off-spinner Joe Root’s against both lefties and righties, but isn’t as relatively strong as Leach against his favoured match-up. Root’s off-spin is very serviceable and I can’t understand why he’s not bowling more as opposed to picking a specialist spinner.

I’m pretty sure Root understand match-ups to a decent extent. He’s been savvy enough to bowl himself against lefties in Test cricket 42% of the time from 2016 onwards (14% higher than he’s utilised Bess, who is at 28%) so he’s taken the preferable match-up more frequently than he’s given Bess. He was also used as a double over bowling option in The Hundred when he had a great match-up with two left-handers batting.

Given all of the above, it is truly perplexing why England make such basic strategic errors with their selection. I’m assuming they have access to at least as much data as I do (and probably much more), but what I don’t know is how good their analysts are, at either drawing conclusions from the data or communicating them to the management. Or, are the analysts really good but the management don’t listen? That’s another plausible scenario. It’s also perhaps become more of an issue since England dispensed with Ed Smith as Chairman of Selectors - in his absence, there presumably is now less of an independent voice in the selection decision-making and I’d love to find out more about how accountable Root and Silverwood are with the decisions they make.

Whatever the reasons, England need to sort this out, and quickly. They’ve lost at home to New Zealand and India already this year, and are 1-0 down and en route to a thrashing in The Ashes as well. Not many captains and coaches last such a run of results, so the next four Tests will be pivotal for the future of both Root and Silverwood.

** Thanks so much to everyone who has bought me a coffee. I truly appreciate it and your kind words inspire me to create even more content!**

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