ONE OF the pleasures of the exercise on which I embarked with trepidation some days ago is that I knew I would be able to choose two spin bowlers for each side. Cricket is a better game when it affords opportunities to bowlers of all types. Good matches need the changes of tempo and good batsmen the different challenges that slow bowlers who give it a real tweak provide.

It is England's turn first, but if there is any cupboard that is relatively bare, it is the one marked: "High Quality England Spinners of the Past 20 Years". Once it would not have been a problem. The old country was never rich in wrist spinners, but finger spin was quite a different matter, especially in the case of the long tradition of left-arm orthodox slow bowlers.

Briggs, Peel, Blythe, Rhodes, Woolley, Verity, Lock, Wardle, Underwood, Edmonds, Tufnell, Giles: there is still a discernible ribbon of talent, threadbare as it may now seem and no matter how few the alternatives have been to the last two mentioned.

It is, however, worrying that the tradition of having a slow left-armer in the side has barely survived the changes in the game that have so emasculated the finger spinner in England since the advent of heavier bats, regular limited overs cricket and, above all, the abandonment of uncovered pitches in the watershed year of 1981.

Gradually they seem to be fading from first-class cricket in England, even from the club and school games that feed the professional ranks, making it essential that, unless pitches are again left open to the caprice of the weather, they should be replaced by wrist spinners, the traditional hard-wicket slow bowlers.

Off spinners have sometimes been even thinner on the ground since Jim Laker made himself the best of the lot. Yet on two occasions since his last Test in 1959 England have gone on a tour to Australia with three specialist off-spin bowlers: Fred Titmus, David Allen and Ray Illingworth in 1962-63 and Geoff Miller, Eddie Hemmings and Vic Marks 20 years later. In between, Pat Pocock and Jack Birkenshaw were picked alongside Derek Underwood to make three specialist spinners in the England side at Port of Spain in 1973-74, yet it was a third, temporary, off spinner, Tony Greig, who turned out to be the prime match-winner.

It makes sense to pick a pair of spinners who turn the ball different ways. All the good off spinners have had balls that drift away from the right-handed batsman and all the best left-armers have possessed the one that dips into the toes, but there have been no English equivalents of the trio of wizards from the East, Muralitharan, Saqlain and Harbhajan, with their disguised wrong-uns that spin the other way from the stock ball.

It is to the very best of the orthodox that I turn in the hope and expectation of undoing some of the array of batting talent assembled on the other side, especially in conditions that will suit finger spin at Calcutta and Sydney. Recognising that, in all conditions, a high degree of control and accuracy is also required against the likes of Viv Richards, Brian Lara and Sachin Tendulkar, men whose instinct is to attack slow bowlers, the choices rest between Laker, Titmus, Illingworth and Bob Appleyard to spin it into the right-handers; and between Lock, Wardle and Underwood to make it go the other way.

Appleyard was by common consent a great bowler. He did not play Test cricket until he was 30 because of illness and no sooner had he seized 200 wickets for Yorkshire in 1951 than he was struck down by pleurisy early the following season. He did not play again until 1954 but in his first five overs in Test cricket he took four for six against Pakistan and in the winter of 1954-55 he topped the England averages in Australia. His ill-health returned and he retired in 1958, having played only nine Tests. He was tall, bowled off breaks at medium pace with a high action and made the ball dip.

Titmus was a marvellous cricketer whose batting ability (he did the 100 wicket-1,000 run double eight times) makes him a tempting choice. Even before he lost his four toes in a boating accident in the West Indies he seemed to run up to bowl on the sides of his feet and he used the breeze to make the ball curl, drift and dip like a seabird below the clouds. He was like a patient fisherman, reeling in his prey on lines of different length. He took 153 Test wickets in 53 Tests.

Illingworth's record is similar and his slight inferiority as a bowler was more than cancelled out by his captaincy. As an off spinner he was quite different, although no less patient. He always knew exactly what he was trying to do and he had the control to carry out his plan, running in at a slow trot that seemed to give him time to think and drawing the batsman forward with tiny changes of pace and length.

But, of course, he did not spin it as furiously as Laker. It was the rip that that great bowler gave to the ball after his sauntering run, his arm sweeping across a braced left side, that gave batsmen no respite on turning pitches. The consequent flight and turn, allied to great accuracy, makes him the obvious choice.

Laker's 19 wickets at Old Trafford were sufficient to induce instant hero worship in me. One by one on that incredible afternoon in Manchester the Australians came and went, bowled, caught in the leg-trap or plumb leg-before as they went back and the ball spun sharply from outside the off stump. When it was all done, and all ten Australians were in his bag for the second time in that unforgettable summer of 1956, Jim popped his sweater over his left shoulder and walked off.

After all the rain there were relatively few spectators but, as he used to say, if everyone who claimed to have been there actually had been, they would have filled Old Trafford's football ground too.

Laker is immortal for this one astounding feat but it was merely the apogee of a fine career. Of the possible left-arm partners he would obviously have chosen Lock out of loyalty but he would have known that Wardle, capable like Sobers of bowling devastating wrist spin as well as left-arm orthodox, was more versatile. The selectors of the 1950s found it hard enough to separate these two and I am not going to try, preferring instead the remorseless loose-armed accuracy and subtle changes of pace that made Underwood's slow-medium orthodox spin so dangerous. On a damp pitch he was deadly; on a flat one utterly reliable. Seventeen times he took five wickets in an innings for England; six times ten in a match. No other England spinner can match that. Times without number he was the answer to a harassed captain's prayer.

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