Want more pace bowlers? Or better batsmen? Then change the rules

When the West Indies line up to start the first Test on Wednesday they will do so with a pace quartet that, by some estimations, is the best since the early 1990s. This is no accident.

The resurgence of pace bowling in the Caribbean has partly been brought about through artificial means. Bonus points were introduced for wickets taken by pace in youth matches and, from 2016/17, in first-class cricket too. A slight undermining of sporting integrity — in Caribbean first-class cricket, all wickets no longer count the same — was deemed less important than improving the pace bowling stocks. That the West Indies’s quick bowlers have averaged a combined 23 in Test cricket since the start of 2018, second only to India, is emphatic vindication for this strategy.

This invites questions about whether such aggressive strategies can be mimicked to help other countries correct their skill shortages.

The idea is not exactly new — the bonus-points system in the County Championship, created in 1957, is designed to reward first innings runs — but there has been a new wave of experimentation in first-class cricket in recent years.

From the debris of four consecutive away Ashes defeats, Australia introduced the Dukes ball for half the Sheffield Shield programme from 2016/17. From 2016, the County Championship gave visiting teams the chance to forego the toss and bowl first if they desired, to try and improve the quality of pitches and prevent medium-pacers running riot.

Australia’s plan improved their seam bowling in England, helping retain the urn last summer, but Sheffield Shield matches with the Dukes featured less spin bowling, leading Cricket Australia to revert to using the Kookaburra for the whole campaign. The ECB have ditched the no-toss option, with the feeling that home teams could still prepare wickets that deteriorated rapidly in the hope of batting first.

Yet such experimentation with domestic first-class competitions is likely to continue. The success of their strategy to encourage pace bowling has already encouraged the West Indies to look at similar measures to boost wrist spin.

“We're not too happy with the amount of wrist spinners that we're seeing. There is a feeling that we need wrist spin for international cricket, to be more successful, certainly in the shorter formats,” explains Jimmy Adams, the West Indies’s director of cricket. “There is the thinking that we might have to start tweaking a few rules...not necessarily at first-class level, but maybe a lot earlier. Can we start introducing more of this type of bowling into our  junior levels and see what happens? The thinking is the same. If we plan it, we think we have a better chance of getting the outcome we want in four or five years time.”

The West Indies’s pace example attests to how properly-targeted measures in domestic and junior cricket can produce more of the types of players that international teams need most. Extending similar thinking to other countries — on the basis that part of domestic cricket’s role is to produce international cricketers — and the possibilities are intriguing.

Could Sri Lanka, like the West Indies, award bonus points for wickets taken by quicks? Could Ireland, whose pitches are often better-suited to seam bowling than to genuine pace, penalise domestic teams who fail to bowl a certain proportion of overs at 80mph plus? Could domestic teams in England and South Africa get extra points for wickets taken by wrist spinners? In an age when financial realities risk reducing the amount of overseas cricket that the best young players are exposed to these are, if nothing else, questions worth asking.