Spinners now bowl not to be hit, and it shows

The dominant spin bowling of the short formats is a containment craft, and it is producing bowlers who cannot attack a defensive batter.

Watch the middle overs of almost any short-format match and count how many deliveries from the spinner are genuinely trying to take a wicket. Not accidentally take a wicket off a top edge. Trying. The number is small, and it is small because the job description has changed.

The modern middle-over spinner is asked to bowl quick and flat into the pitch, on a line the batter cannot access easily, with two sweepers behind square. He concedes his six or seven an over, takes the mishit when it comes, and is judged a success. That is a real skill and it wins matches. It is also a fundamentally defensive craft dressed in a wicket-taker's job title.

The cost shows up when those bowlers are asked to bowl at a batter who is not trying to hit them. Put the same spinner into a long-format fourth innings with a defensive batter and no scoreboard pressure, and he has no method. He has spent his career waiting for a batter to make a mistake he was already inclined to make. Take that inclination away and there is nothing left, because he was never taught to create a mistake from nothing.

Creating one requires the things that are expensive in the short formats. Loop, which can be hit. Changes of pace through the air rather than off the pitch, which can be picked. A ball tossed wider and slower to invite a drive, which is the single most productive attacking delivery in the history of spin bowling and is also the delivery most likely to go for six. Every one of those tools is a risk, and a bowler who is graded on economy will never buy one.

So you get squads full of spinners who are excellent at one job and helpless at the other, and selectors who then complain that nobody can bowl a side out on the last afternoon.

My view is that this is a coaching failure rather than a format failure. There is no reason a spinner cannot own both methods and switch between them, other than that nobody has been made to practise the unprofitable one.

The wicket-taking version pays a lot better than the safe version, and only in the format where the pay is slowest.