Jack Leach misses chance to turn the game England's way

It is never a good sign when England send their opponents in on a greenish pitch and have to bring their spinner on before lunch, in this latest case Jack Leach for the 20th over at 71 without loss. The nearest Joe Root has ever come to being stroppy in public was when, after sending the opposition in, he had to bring himself on, far too early, because his seamers were not performing.

The results are a shade damning. Only in the last decade has sending the opposition in become frequent, and in this context England have won five Tests and lost eleven. Sir Alastair Cook and Root have stood at first slip, hands on hips because no edges were coming their way, while their cunning plans have soured.

But Ben Stokes’s decision to insert here against New Zealand did not backfire because James Anderson and Stuart Broad stubbornly adhered to defensive back-of-a-length. New Zealand are on top because their batting, like the pitch, is sound; and the strident wind off the Trent played its part in reducing the ball’s swing and blowing England’s seamers off course.

It is rather important for the future of Test cricket in England that one spinner or another makes a mark this summer: Leach, or one of India’s in the Edgbaston Test, or South Africa’s Keshav Maharaj or Simon Harmer in August. Otherwise the Test format is going to become monotonous. The generations when every England team would include two spinners are gone forever; and the time when five seamers bang away all day, and over-rates slump even further, might be very close at hand.

So if the woman who caught the ball in her beer glass, when Daryl Mitchell drove a six into it, was going to raise the replacement glass to anyone, it should have been Leach. If only for the sake of