7 hours ago
3
We used to have a saying in selection: Pick on character. And I think Liam Dawson has got an abundance of character.
He would have been nervous yesterday because you’re always a better player when you’re out of the side. To come into the team mid-series is not easy, especially when you have been out of it for eight years and a lot of people have been calling for your return.
However much he says he is just taking everything as a bonus at his age, it is still playing for England in an iconic series, that the country is taking about and that’s started to kick off. So when you’re suddenly brought in, you will feel the heat and you have to perform. And he certainly did that yesterday.
Dawson is the polar opposite to the man he has replaced, Shoaib Bashir. He is a veteran left-arm spinner with 15 five-wicket hauls in first-class cricket and knows his game inside out. He is the finished article.
Bashir, meanwhile, is a young right arm off-spinner who was plucked from nowhere from a social media feed because he has a high release point.
What Dawson brings to this England team is control, which Bashir is still seeking and looking for.
Liam Dawson was among the wickets after an eight-year absence from the Test set up
He brought control to the attack with ball in hand as England put India in to bat first up
While Shoaib Bashir gets more over spin, drop and bounce he often lacks that same control
On the first day at Old Trafford, when it's not spinning a lot, you need to offer your team and your captain that control so that he can rotate the seamers at the other end. Dawson did that beautifully. India’s run rate dropped in the second session because of his control.
Bashir gets more over spin, drop and bounce because he is taller than Dawson and has that high release point. If you think of Bashir’s wicket to win the Test at Lord’s, the ball span back and rolled on to Mohammed Siraj’s stumps because it bounced up on him.
Dawson, with his lower action, may struggle to get that. But he is more accurate and challenges the pad of the right hander, as well as the outside edge of the left hander from that rough and with the drift that he gets. We saw that with his wicket of Yashasvi Jaiswal.
Because Dawson is landing it in the rough all the time, Jaiswal didn’t know if it was going to spin or not, and his natural variation and drift meant he took the outside edge and it carried to Harry Brook at first slip.It was also very good captaincy from Ben Stokes. Jaiswal is a fine player of spin, as Tom Hartley found out in India. But Stokes put a deep point in, which may have made Jaiswal push at the ball and open the blade, trying to get a single to the boundary.
What Dawson also has in his favour over Bashir, and another left-arm spinner Jack Leach, is that he is a multi-dimensional cricketer.
He is very good in the field and a very good No8. With Dawson batting at eight, Chris Woakes at nine, Brydon Carse at 10 and Jofra Archer at 11, that is suddenly a very good lower order, which is going to be needed not only in the rest of this series, but also in Australia in the winter.
My former England coach Duncan Fletcher always wanted complete cricketers in his team. We had to move on from Phil Tufnell, who was a wonderful left-arm spinner and I absolutely loved captaining, because he didn’t bat and didn’t field, and we picked Ashley Giles, who was very good at gully and got you useful runs.
If Dawson has two really good games against India, the debate will be about whether he should become England’s No1 spinner and play against Australia.
But that's for another time. He’s had one good day and he's got one wicket – but he did his role and that’s all you can ask of anyone you bring into your team.
