This early season clutch of County Championship matches was supposed to be the time for players on the fringes of the England side to really make an impression.
It is odd then, with that in mind, that Rehan Ahmed was this week allowed to leave Leicestershire and join Delhi Capitals for the rest of the Indian Premier League (IPL), taking him out of the next three rounds of the championship.
There are plenty of areas of concern for England after the Ashes and none more so than who they pick as a spinner this summer.
Shoaib Bashir’s blank Ashes tour and Will Jacks’ bits-and-pieces offerings did nothing to settle the issue. Bashir is back doing the groundwork at Derbyshire this summer and had plenty of bowling in the early rounds, but there is a feeling he will benefit massively from a season away from the England spotlight to rebuild his bowling.
Jacks has not bowled a ball since the end of the Twenty20 World Cup, and Rehan sent down only 56 overs in two championship matches, taking six wickets before his switch to Delhi this week on hardly life-changing money of £60,000.
He went with England’s blessing – he is a centrally contracted player – and replaced Ben Duckett at Delhi after he decided to concentrate on his Test career and score some runs in county cricket.
It is a bit much to expect any spinner to knock the door down in April on slow, green pitches but it can still be a time to build some rhythm and maybe a bit of confidence by performing when the odds are stacked in favour of the Dukes ball and the medium pacers.
It is the same old debate of IPL versus county cricket. It blew up last week when the differences between Kevin Pietersen and Sir Alastair Cook resurfaced over whether Jacob Bethell should be playing county cricket instead of IPL bench-warming.
Pietersen loved the IPL and remains bitter at how England treated him over his desire to play in the competition. It is no surprise that he and Cook, the dutiful England and Essex opener, have widely different views on which is better for a player’s development.
Bethell is not trying to impress selectors whereas Rehan, you hope, is desperate to break into the Test side. Perhaps if he gets a run in the Delhi team, which will not be easy with India stars Axar Patel and Kuldeep Yadav in the side, he could find it hugely beneficial. Playing in front of huge crowds under the weight of expectation in the IPL is a valuable life experience for a young player.
But if he does not play, like Bethell, then it feels like wasted time just when he could be building an inarguable case to start the Test summer for England.
Pietersen was a well-established Test player when he went to the IPL. Rehan and Bethell, despite his Sydney Ashes hundred, are still learning the game and few players in sport improve when they are not playing.
Rehan would give England a rounded spin attack as a leggie, complementing Joe Root with his off-spin and Bethell’s left arm. None are frontline spinners but between them could be enough on June pitches against New Zealand.
Brendon McCullum, the England head coach, loves Rehan’s enthusiasm and picked him as an 18-year-old in Pakistan. He has looked very raw as a leg-spinner in Test cricket and batted with reckless abandon. He has an average of 10 because he has not prized his wicket in any way and that will have to improve as much as his bowling.
But he needs a run of games, a bit of exposure at Test level and with no other obvious alternative, Rehan has a good chance.
The decision to play in the IPL leaves England choosing between someone who will not have bowled with a red ball in weeks or picking on very little early-season form, the perennial problem.
Farhan Ahmed, Rehan’s brother and Notts hopeful, has not played yet this season and spare a thought for Tom Hartley. He is struggling to get in the Lancashire side and thought he had an unexpected chance when called in as an injury substitute at Durham on Saturday for Arav Shetty but the officials deemed he was not a like-for-like replacement because he is much more experienced. Batsman George Bell was allowed to play instead – hardly a way to encourage spin bowling in county cricket.
Bashir has done a decent job for his new county, with nine wickets so far. It is not bad considering only Mason Crane at Glamorgan and Calvin Harrison at Northants are spinners in double figures when it comes to wickets. Crane has not played a Test for 10 years since his one and only cap in the death throes of another poor Ashes tour. He scored 99 on Saturday for Glamorgan, his first-class best, against Leicestershire but had less fun with the ball with his first six overs going at seven an over.
The two Sussex hopefuls – Jack Carson and James Coles – have seven wickets between them from very little bowling and were wicketless on day two against Yorkshire. There was one landmark for an England-qualified spinner in that game however – Root took his 100th first-class wicket.
Only James Rew, who is not playing in this round with Somerset having a blank week, has really mounted a challenge to sneak into the Test side from the outside and even he is being talked about as an opener, rather than middle-order player where he plays in county cricket at the moment.
Ben McKinney made a case to steal Zak Crawley’s place with 244 against Gloucestershire two weeks ago but that was against a team rooted to the bottom of the table. A greater test was against Lancashire on Saturday and he had his off stump uprooted to the second ball he faced from James Anderson.
Emilio Gay, another contender, looked to have done all the hard work by seeing off Anderson on a tricky morning for batting at Chester-le-Street only to ruin it later on. With the sun shining and the ball settling down, he drove hard at Tom Bailey and nicked to the only slip in the cordon for 41.
Ben Duckett made his first fifty since the Oval Test last year before clothing part-time spinner Rob Yates to mid-on, a wasted chance to really kick off his season. Duckett had a miserable winter but his weight of runs in previous summers gives him a little more surety over his England place than Crawley, particularly with the management unlikely to want to make two top-order changes.