Can you name England’s seven walk-on part England spinners of the 2010s?

1. I got five without cheating.

   1. Would be fun to try and guess the ones you didn’t get. Did we preemptively guess one correctly in the C365 article?

      1. Didn’t get the two left-armers.

      2. (Didn’t get two of the three left-armers, rather.)

      3. Sounds like you forgot the one we predicted people would forget.

      4. One of the seven has just been called up again….a chance to add to his decade tally

      5. He’ll still creep in under our three-Test threshold though, even if he gets selected.

2. This is the first of your articles to which I have reacted ‘sad’

   1. A new high/low.

   2. The Ben Foakes one seemed to get a handful of sads too.

3. ‘Signing to play for Shropshire’ sounds like a euphemism for something, but I can’t decide what.

   1. Hahaha

4. I also got five and also forgot two of the left-armers (the one you predicted people would forget and the last one on the list). I was going to object to the last one on the grounds that he was actually a top-order batsman who just happened to bowl a bit of spin, but apparently he never batted above 8 for England and a cursory glance at a couple scorecards suggests he was more of a middle-order allrounder type at county level. So I guess it’s fair, and it’s not as though I would have remembered him even if he’d been described as “a middle-order allrounder type at county level who was picked for England as a specialist spinner and mostly batted at 10”

5. I got 4.

   How much responsibility does the England set up bear for Kerrigan and Ansari I wonder? I get the feeling Ansari might always have grown bored with cricket but Kerrigan was a real quality spinner…

   1. Ansari’s reasoning was that he wasn’t single-minded enough for international cricket and didn’t want to be either.

      Kerrigan it’s more complex. He wasn’t called up for no reason and he wasn’t omitted for no reason either. It was one of those picks where they wanted to take a look though – as several of these spin selections were – rather than him being someone they definitely wanted in the side. Maybe his call-up and dropping weren’t as well managed as they might have been.

6. If you will accept answers including “Hampshire spinner” and “lawyer boy who quit”, then I managed 6 out of 7. I was surprised to see Tredwell on the list as I had forgotten that he was such an odi specialist.

   1. It is very much in the spirit of this site to accept those answers and not even acknowledge that there’s anything amiss.

7. Pakistan. Woof.

8. BJ Watling’s playing for Lancashire next year. That’s a nice one!

9. Happy, Sleepy, Sneezy, Dopey, Grumpy, Bashful, Doc.

   I’ve smashed it.

   What exactly was the question again?

10. I got five too. I considered one of them and discarded him as surely he must have played more than two Tests. He hadn’t.

    I didn’t get number 4 at all.

11. Festivus came and went without so much as a mention on this site this year.

    Now there’s a grievance – a broigus even, that I can nurture and air for many a year henceforward.

    1. Festivus is a moveable feast.

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