LONDON: Former captain Nasser Hussain urged the England batsmen to learn from their approach against Pakistan leg-spinner Yasir Shah with tours to Sri Lanka and India coming up in the winter.

Hussain, writing in his column for the Daily Mail, pointed out how the English batsmen were trying to play the Pakistan leg-spinner on the backfoot ‘as if he were Shane Warne’. He suggested they should instead approach him “more like Anil Kumble”, at least in the first innings of the Test.

“England have a winter of Test cricket in sub-continental conditions coming up against Sri Lanka and India if those tours go ahead, so they must learn from how they are playing Yasir Shah here,” Hussain wrote. “For some reason, whether it is Joe Root or Ollie Pope, England have been going back to the leg-spinner and getting stuck on the crease. They are playing him as if he were Shane Warne but, in the first innings of a Test, they should play him more like Anil Kumble.

“Yasir will not bowl massive, turning deliveries on the first day. Instead, he has been setting batsmen up by going slow, slow and then producing a quicker, straighter delivery.

“And whether it’s his trajectory, action or whether England noticed Pakistan pushed the field back and were trying to hang back to hit deep cover-point for a single and get off strike, I don’t know. But a lot of batsmen are being trapped on the back foot.”

Published in Dawn, August 23rd, 2020