"A lot of people said T20 would ruin spin bowling": The story of the early trailblazers, who set a trend and changed the game

NICK FRIEND: Nayan Doshi was the first man to 50 T20 wickets; Jason Brown was the inaugural Twenty20 Cup's most successful spinner. Their survival – when it was said that spin and T20 couldn't mix – opened a door to all those who have since followed

“To be honest, I think a few of us really paved the way for spin in T20 now,” says Nayan Doshi. “I feel like it should be slightly recognised in T20 cricket.”

It is difficult now to imagine a world without it; the top nine bowlers in the ICC’s T20I rankings are spinners – a mixture of mystery, wristwork and guile. They account, too, for five of the top 10 wicket-takers in the format’s history. Sunil Narine, Imran Tahir, Shakib Al Hasan, Shahid Afridi and Rashid Khan: a franchise circuit without them seems unthinkable.

And then there is Doshi, the former Surrey left-arm spinner – a veteran of a game that was still embryonic during his heyday.

On June 24, 2007, he became the first cricketer to the milestone of 50 T20 wickets. Charl Willoughby followed him less than a fortnight later, with 16 more seamers joining an elite club before a second spinner would join Doshi atop that mountain.

That man was Muttiah Muralitharan, followed shortly afterwards by Afridi, Graeme Swann, James Tredwell and Danish Kaneria.

Don’t underestimate that fact. Doshi, the son of a former India bowler but born in Nottingham, was the original T20 gun. In his first three years, he took 46 wickets – one every 11.7 deliveries, with four four-wicket hauls. In 2006, he picked up 21 scalps in the Twenty20 Cup – no other spinner came within six.

“I think we showed people that spin could be effective,” he adds. “We made spin a wicket-taking – and match-winning – part of T20. Now it’s in the IPL and other leagues, but we did it here first. We were the guys who did it. We paved the way.”

Doshi didn’t even make his T20 debut until 2004 – the county competition’s second year, but he grasped it like few others; the journey from zero to 50 took him just 29 games. In a Surrey side packed full of big names – Ali Brown, Mark Ramprakash, Greg Blewett, Mark Butcher and Adam Hollioake all featured on his debut, he had become the trump card.

^{Nayan Doshi was the first T20 gun - the first man worldwide to 50 wickets in the format}

What exists now as a remarkable, global behemoth first came into being in 2003, on the county circuit. And while spin has become a match-winning fundamental, early game theorem was really quite different.

“Like everyone else, I wanted to be involved,” recalls Martyn Ball, then of Gloucestershire. “It was very exciting, but was it going to be the death of the everyday spinner?”

Former Northamptonshire off-spinner Jason Brown adds: “I think we just expected to get teed up and that would be it. That’s where the batters, I think, thought they would score the majority of their runs.”

Brown was the most successful spinner in the inaugural tournament in 2003, taking 11 wickets in what was then a five-game group stage.

He laughs at the memories of his early success – he only realised how well he had done when he received a cheque in the post as a reward. There was no sense of enigma to his bowling, no hidden tricks in his armoury. Rather, as a man earmarked more as a red-ball bowler whose job had previously been to land each ball on the same sixpence, this was an alien step.

“It was just the unknown really, wasn’t it? I remember sitting down as a group and we spent quite a bit of time deciding how we’d go about it,” he says. “Would we send people in just to go big from the start? And then you had to start thinking about it as a spinner.

“I think, for me, it was just a case of adapting to it and trying to change it up as much as I could without doing anything too different from what I normally did. It was a funny one – especially the first season. Nobody really knew how to bowl or bat. You went into it blindfolded and hoped you came out of it okay.”

One benefit for Brown was his relationship with Matthew Hayden, who had spent time at Northants as an overseas player. A batsman ahead of his time in some respects, he had pushed the notion of spinners opening the bowling in white-ball cricket, and so Brown’s mind had already been turned to innovation.

“I just went away and worked on different flight variations, slight variations in speed and how to bowl a quick yorker,” he explains. “It was a good ball to bowl back then because it was a time where reverse-sweeps and fine sweeps weren’t in the game as much. Now, those balls disappear out of grounds.”

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If Brown set the initial bar among off-spinners in the first Twenty20 Cup, Kenya’s Collins Obuya topped the charts for leg-spinners in 2003. Gareth Batty, Robert Croft and Ball were also among the top five wicket-taking spinners.

Looking back now, they were unwitting trailblazers. Had things turned out differently, what might the game look like today? If spinners had been taken down in the early years, would the generations that followed have felt so inclined to retrace their steps? Would coaches and captains have felt sufficiently emboldened to build teams around them?

“There are a lot of people who said: ‘This will ruin spin bowling,’” Doshi retorts. “But I don’t agree with that. To be honest, I think the people that said that didn’t have a lot of cricket knowledge.

“I looked at the T20 game a little bit differently. At Surrey, we were generally quite an attacking side, whether we played County Championship or 50-over stuff, so us spinners were always used as an attacking option. So, when we played spinners in T20, we were always looking to take wickets and how to take wickets.”

While Brown and Ball were both seasoned professionals by 2003, Doshi was younger and fresher, ready to throw himself into a format he had been brought up on as a junior cricketer.

He saw T20’s advent for what it was: an opportunity, a thought that only grew once a shoulder problem restricted his ability to bowl longer spells in red-ball competition. Indian Premier League stints followed with Rajasthan Royals and Royal Challengers Bangalore during the tournament’s adolescence; Brendon McCullum was among his victims.

But curiously – and in no small part down to the mobility of his shoulder, Doshi’s rise was almost as steep as his fall. Now 41 years of age, however, he wants to mount a comeback as a professional. After a five-year break that has given his injury plenty of time to heal, he is playing for Brondesbury in the Middlesex Premier League. “I feel like I’m bowling fantastically well again,” he insists. At his peak, the potency of his bowling was in its simplicity.

“I always believed that you had to bowl at your strength,” he adds. “The batsman is always going to do certain things, but if in your mind you’re thinking that the batsman is doing this or that, then you’re already on the back foot. I always thought about where I as most likely to take a wicket.

“And if I wasn’t going to take a wicket, how could I stop myself conceding a single? It was wicket first. If not wicket, no run. That was my mentality. I always tried to produce that and to be as attacking as I could be. I never used to think about conceding a boundary. A lot of it is mindset.

“We always believed that if you took wickets, the run rate would go down anyway. I always wanted a short extra cover. Depending on the situation, a slip as well.”

^{Martyn Ball took eight wickets in the first year of the tournament}

To a degree, it seems strange to link what we have now to where it all began. The means of deception have changed; for all the mystery of today’s protagonists, the early days of the Twenty20 Cup were dominated by a different subtlety.

“I think we were all much of a muchness, weren’t we?” Brown reflects. “There were lots of decent bowlers about – Shaun Udal, Martyn Ball, Gary Keedy. But there was nobody who we thought would set it alight. I think that’s probably where I adapted quite well – I changed it up a little bit.”

In Ball’s case, he knew this was coming. As well as having spent 15 years at Gloucestershire by the time T20 arrived – he had been awarded his benefit year in 2002, he doubled up as chairman of the Professional Cricketers’ Association.

The organisation had been devising its own ideas, with one similar concept called Zone Six centred around city-based franchise teams. The plan never came to fruition but during talks with the ECB, the national governing body hinted that they were in favour of a shortened version of the game.

And for Ball, who had been part of Gloucestershire’s white-ball successes at the turn of the century, this was merely an extension. They reached Finals Day in 2003 in a side featuring Craig Spearman, Jonty Rhodes and Ian Harvey.

In Harvey, there was a template to follow; even two decades on, people still speak of his variations. “Having Harv in your team brought the mindset that you had to have some armoury,” Ball says. “You had to bring something into your game to be able to be the best.”

The carrom ball, though initially introduced as early as the 1940s, had gone out of fashion and would not properly return until Ajantha Mendis burst onto the scene. Meanwhile, the doosra was treated in England with a twin sense of mystique and distrust. Muralitharan and Saqlain Mushtaq were among a select band to have perfected the art.

Yet, interestingly – and perhaps contrary to popular thought at the time, both Brown and Ball had played around with it.

“I was an old dog not necessarily with any new tricks,” Ball says. “I didn’t develop a doosra but, don’t get me wrong, I practised it. I took my hat off to the likes of Murali, who had it. I tried but I couldn’t do it.

“It was something you tried but it wasn’t something where you’d been doing it since you were 14. To bring something out in a match, no matter how much you’ve practised it, is tough. It’s more of a weakness if you try to bowl something that could come out as a waist-high full toss or a complete longhop.”

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Brown, too, recognised its value. He tried to develop a delivery out of the front of his hand that would spin like a leg-break and also worked on an undercutter that, if it landed as he wanted it to, would nip away like a doosra rather than spinning in if it hit the seam.

“Jeremy Snape used to bowl his moonball,” he adds. “It was just one of those things: how can I bowl the same ball but change the length? And that was it. Everybody was searching for those different options to stop a batter scoring.”

Doshi never looked to develop new deliveries per se, partially because – as a left-armer – his arm-ball could do the job of a doosra. He reflects: “I became the T20 bowler I was because I had strong basics. I didn’t do anything different. I didn’t say: ‘Right, I’m going to prepare like this for T20.’”

Without that element of mystery so prevalent in today’s game, there was a huge reliance on developing a new mental fortitude. Being hit over the ropes is par for the course these days; it comes with the territory of bowling spin often on batsman-friendly surfaces at players with phenomenal ranges of strokeplay and big bats on small boundaries.

In 2003, however, it took some getting used to for bowlers of a certain vintage, even if – as Doshi stresses – the likes of Ali Brown had already been around for some time. “What is funny is that people say T20 changed,” he says. “But we used to get 200 on a consistent basis. In my first game, we got 220 and bowled Sussex out.”

Brown puts much of his success down to his ability to adapt and how quickly he was able to become used to T20’s unique challenges. “You might bowl well and go for 35 – that was unheard of,” he says. “That’s what you went for off eight overs in the one-day games. I relished playing it because it was fast-paced and you were thinking on your feet.

“You had to prepare to go for those runs. If I was putting the ball in the same spot, that gave a batsman the chance to line me up. As a County Championship spinner, that was my job – to tie somebody down. Whereas in T20, if you bowl the same ball, he could hit you to the same place six times and then you’re struggling.

“I might bowl my first few a bit quicker, but then once I felt a bit looser, I’d start thinking about changing it up a little bit. It was a mindset shift – you had to accept that sometimes 30 was not a bad result.

“I always wanted the ball in my hand. If I’d gone for a lot, I wanted to prove that I could do it. If my first two overs had gone for 20, I wanted to come back to finish off so I could make my others go for five – I didn’t hide in the corner and say I didn’t want to bowl anymore. I always wanted to be in the battle – I suppose that’s why I adapted my game.”

^{Jason Brown was the leading spinner in the inaugural competition in 2003}

How would his game have stood up to the challenges of bowling at today’s T20 batsmen?

“I think I would have developed with how it went,” Brown ponders. “I would have tried to work out other variations – I’d have stayed with the yorker, looked at slower balls and wider balls, creating other angles so batsmen are hitting across it.

“Sometimes, I think about it and how we started. I watch games and think: ‘Would it still be the same?’ I had to bowl at Andy Flower. Back in the day, he was reverse-sweeping, running down the wicket and bumping you over the top.”

Ball set himself a pair of benchmarks: outperforming his opposition spinner and making sure that the required run rate rose while he was bowling. Both might seem like obvious ploys but they put Ball at ease. “I think that took away the element of fear of thinking that I had to bowl my four overs for X,” he muses.

“I suppose that comes back to the fact that I didn’t have a doosra or this or that. Yes, I varied my pace but I would always try to beat the match situation.

“For me, it was more of a mental approach and staying cool. Yes, you could change your pace and your lines, spin it harder, have an arm-ball. Yes, I would work on my variations, but there was also the element of being game-savvy.

“I knew the state of the game what they needed to do. For example, if you knew you couldn’t afford to get hit for six, there was no point in trying to bowl your glory ball.”

By the time T20 arrived on the scene, Ball had already bowled 24,938 deliveries in first-class cricket, with his career crossing over a number of eras. He had made his debut for Gloucestershire in 1988 under the captaincy of David Graveney – nearer in time to the first World Cup than the introduction of T20.

He believes the transition to T20 cricket was eased for him because he had played through some of the innovations of the 1990s: a five-man limit was placed on the number of fielders allowed on the legside, while the reverse-sweep – though not as mainstream as it is today – had become a well-utilised white-ball shot against off-spin.

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The combined effect of the two – bowlers had changed their line to account for the legside law change but then found themselves being reverse-swept as a result – had already forced finger-spinners to rethink their plans.

“There were innovative players already,” he points out. “The way that Andrew Symonds came over and broke the world six-hitting record. You had the reverse-sweepers already. Craig Spearman for us – some of the shots he played, sweeping seamers. These shots were already there.

“I think it’s just the amount; rather than a few players being innovative, the whole team becomes innovative.

“When I first started, we played 60-over one-day games; we played it like a shortened version of four-day cricket. There wasn’t much tactical discussion about how you’d approach it differently. It was red-ball and you bowled with two slips and a gully. It wasn’t any much different than that.

“If you chased 240 in a 60-over game, it was going to be a good game. Now, sometimes 240 isn’t enough in a T20.”

How times have changed. T20 was meant to signal the end of the spinner. Instead, it has brought about a rebirth.

“I do believe that we paved the way,” Doshi reiterates. “I don’t like putting myself out there, but I do believe that these things should be known and acknowledged; we are deserving of that.”

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