Thank You Ashley Giles

Not many people will rate Ashley Giles along with the great left arm spinners – there haven’t been many either way. But, Ashley Giles contributed his bit to English cricket. He was the solitary spinner in a period of a few years when there was a severe dearth of quality spinners in England.

There was Min Patel, who was unfortunate to have come up against a century from Sachin Tendulkar on his debut; he played only one match after that. There was Shaun Udal, who also just could not keep his place in the side. Giles came in during the 1998 season.

When you see Ashley Giles bowl, the effort and perseverance that go into his spell is instantly evident. Giles had a noticeably unique approach. He preferred bowling left arm over. So many have said that he was negative in doing so and did not give himself and opportunity to attack. We’ll come back to his approach a little later.

He didn’t turn the ball much, but could consistently give the ball a pleasing amount of time in the air; a nice loop. He got his fingers nicely over the ball and his height was an added advantage. It is affordable to reiterate the amount of hard work he did. All this would still have been insufficient. This is where we come back to his approach.

All his effort would still have been insufficient if not for the role he played in the English side. Although, the English side he played in for the greater part of his career did not have a great bowling attack, the English captains did not exactly use him properly. This was probably because they did not know how to use him or due to the conditions they played in – the conditions were not favourable to spin. This is why his approach as it was was useful. He was usually playing second string to Caddick, Gough or Tudor at the other end. He really did not need to attack. He and his captains understood that he just needed to seal runflow and get the occasional breakthrough from one end while the action was at the other. Unfortunately, when you come up against India as a spinner, you have to do something constructive.

It is also incorrect to say that Giles was incapable of attacking the batsmen. Not very often, he went against his style, went around the wickets and frustrated the batsmen. Probably the most impressive aspect of his bowling was the trajectory of his deliveries.

Why did he develop the hip injury? When he bowled, in order to get the drift into the right hander, he exaggerated his pivot. Probably a bit too much for comfort. He exaggerated it to such an extent that he actually turned his upper body quite a bit from his hip. That added a lot more stress on his hip. That is the only perceptible reason for his hip injury – from my point of view at least.

It was sad to hear about his injury and sad to see him go. Ashley Giles probably will not be remembered like Underwood, but will leave his little footstep in the sands of time. Thank you Ashley Giles.-BS

Once again, there has been a delay in blog updating and once again the reason is the shambles of Indian education have been wasting far too much of my time.