Pakistan Women have a complicated relationship with leg spin bowling in T20i cricket. What’s intriguing is that it is complicated in 2 different ways. The first is an easy one: we have an abysmal batting record versus leg spin bowlers. The second: our leg spinners are typically last to be picked and first to be dropped.
This article is a brief examination of this two-fold relationship and what it has meant for our team. There is plenty more to be said about this topic I’m sure, and perhaps some parallels to be drawn to Pakistan men’s cricket too, but for now, this will have to do.
Part 1: Batting vs Leg Spin
Those who watched us bat versus Afy Fletcher (WI) and Sarah Glenn (ENG) will know our batters struggle versus good quality leg spin bowling. As the table below indicates, not only are we pretty bad, but we are also the worst of all full member nations:
There’s no nice way to put this: versus leg spin, we’re terrible at saving our wickets, terrible at scoring runs, and terrible at hitting boundaries.
This glaring weakness has an obvious ramification: all teams must do to take our batting down is bowl a leg spinner. We saw as much in the first T20 vs England, where the game and our batting shifted dramatically when Sarah Glenn came onto bowl. Not only do leg spinners halt our scoring momentum, but it’s very likely that they’ll get a handful of important wickets, triggering collapses that we seldom recover from.
Of course, it doesn’t help that our best player of leg spin, Bismah Maroof, retired in the last few months. And that Muneeba, our only other left-handed batter, just can’t seem to play leg spin this year. And that most teams seem to have figured out that the way to foil our mandatory Aliya-at-the-death plan is to save an over or two of leg spin just for her. And that Nida, who was so good at countering spin in the middle with Bismah by her side, has looked well off her best without her trusted spin-hitting partner.
Even at domestic level, our batters struggle versus all of our leg spinners, whether they’re young and new (like Quratulain Ahsen) or experienced allrounders who seldom bowl (like Bismah Maroof).
At the NWT20 this year, though leg spinners were few and far between and thus delivered less than 14% of all balls, they were by far the most troubling bowling type for our batters.
Even in the comforts of our domestic competition, our batters just can’t seem to catch a break.
So, what are we to do come July, when we’re up against India’s Asha Sobhana or Bangladesh’s Rabeya Khan at the Asia Cup? Surely our game plan must go beyond stuttering and struggling and praying we survive the dreaded spells with minimal damage.
Well, for starters, in the pre-Asia Cup camp, we must work to get the Muneeba Ali of 2023 back to scoring well versus leg spin and she must take her place in the lineup at 3 or 4, to bear the biggest brunt of this bowling type. As long as bringing Bismah Maroof back from retirement remains uncanny (but not impossible – this is Pakistan, remember), Muneeba is our greatest hope. She must fix up.
And while we cannot fix everyone’s issues versus leg spin overnight, we can at least familiarise them with it, so as to reduce the chances of Aliya getting stuck in her crease or Fatima Sana aggressively sweeping and missing for the umpteenth time.
I would simply call up every half-decent leg spinner (male and female) that Pakistan has to the pre-tournament camp, and ask them to bowl relentlessly at our batters in the nets and in practice games. Or just do this to Muneeba and Nida instead of burdening the others just yet, since these are the 2 batters most likely to face the most leg spin and will be critical to Pakistan’s attempts in scraping a passing grade in both tournaments.
These are not the best suggestions you could get, but I can only hope that someone wiser than me has noticed our woes vs leg spin and has a better plan of action. Nida Dar batting left-handed, anyone? No? Okay.
But whatever the case, if our batting versus leg spin doesn’t scare you yet, it probably will come mid-July.
Part 2: Bowling Leg Spin
In the last 5 years, leg spinners have bowled only 10% of deliveries in our T20i bowling innings, considerably less than finger spinners who have bowled 59% of our deliveries.
Now, you may say, why does this matter? Our SLAs and off spinners have always been our main strength. Maybe we simply haven’t produced enough leg spinners to bowl them all that often. Maybe the ones we have are no good.
And sure, we produce more SLAs and off spinners than the human brain can comprehend and leg spinners are a rare commodity. And sure, our best spin bowlers historically have been finger-spinners (Sana Mir, Nida Dar, Anam Amin, Nashra Sandhu etc.). Who needs leg spinners when your finger spinners are what you’re known for?
But who will know our leg spinners if we never play them?
Isn’t it strange that we spent our time in England this past May, playing 3 to 4 finger spinners in all but one game on pitches that did not favour them, while facing a lineup of mostly right-handed batters?
Isn’t it strange that Aroob Shah, after several promising performances at lower levels, bowled just 1 over in the series versus South Africa and then was unceremoniously dropped?
Or that Tuba Hassan’s unlucky finger injury back in late 2022 domino-ed into her being out of the team for a full year with little to no explanation?
Or that Ghulam Fatima did not seem to make our T20i XI, despite her success in ODIs and the gaping hole in our T20i side?
Or that we are content stacking our bowling attack with finger spin and more finger spin, and that a series or match loss often results in us going into defensive mode (read: dropping the leg spinner)?
I am not saying there is a conspiracy here, but perhaps there is a lack of appreciation for the dynamism leg spin offers our attack. We construct our bowling innings in the way we know best, which is most often, pace to open and close and finger spin all through the middle.
We do not consider that a leg spinner, though they may not keep things clean and under control like a finger spinner would, will attack, deceive, and strike in a way that we have lacked through the middle overs in recent times.
We do not consider that different types of bowlers bowling in tandem, particularly various spinners, keeps the opposition on their toes.
We do not consider that perhaps our opponents have come to expect a barrage of finger spin from us, and that may be part of the problem.
I wouldn’t be surprised if we do not even consider our middle overs bowling a problem, based on how often we call it our strength, even though the numbers from recent times tell a startling story.
And as for leg spin being a rare commodity here, while that may be true, it is also a very valuable one.
The three main leg spinners showed as much in this year’s NWT20: Tuba Hassan, bowling after what felt like years, was Quetta’s highest wicket-taker, Syeda Aroob Shah was Karachi’s best bowler, and Lahore’s Ghulam Fatima was the entire tournament’s best bowler.
Pakistan is a nation of mostly right-handed batters and of batters who largely can’t play leg spin – the venn diagram of these 2 is almost a circle – so maybe that explains why leg spinners do so well, but if Pakistan’s right-handed batters struggle to play our leg spin bowlers, who's to say other teams’ right-handed-heavy lineups won’t struggle the same way?
The easiest way to answer this question would be to give at least one of Ghulam Fatima, Aroob Shah, or Tuba Hassan a consistent run with the team. Unfortunately, that seems too much to ask.
What is most fascinating is Tuba, who was the worst of the three main leg spinners in the competition, was brought into the T20i side over the others. And based on the fact that we barely gave her a chance to bat, she wasn’t brought back for her batting either, though that was the real highlight of her NWT20 performance.
Not that I’m complaining about a Tuba Hassan comeback. But when you don’t pick your top 2 leg spin bowlers and you end up with your 3rd best leg spin bowler, then you probably feel justified to drop the same leg spin bowler from your team, right? You can argue they’re not good enough, even if they’ve done rather well on comeback, and the opposition goes on record to say they’re one of the most difficult bowlers they’ve faced as a team.
What’s clear is, we don’t care to treat leg spin or those who bowl it with respect. And both our shortcomings with respect to leg spin, the fact that we cannot play it and the fact that we don’t play our own, will continue to hurt us in the months to come. These are fixable issues, but fixable issues are aplenty in Pakistan women’s cricket, with few people ready to fix them. And that’s just how it is for now.