There was a lovely moment after the Trinidad Test a couple of years back. With the final day’s play between India and West Indies washed out and the match drawn, Ravindra Jadeja and Jomel Warrican went up to the top of the covered stand to chat spin bowling.
And, you know, really chat about it. The dirty, under-the-counter stuff. Alignment, shoulder positions, approach angles, how to maintain efficiency of momentum into the delivery stride. The stuff that, to those uninitiated in the art and argot of left-arm red-ball spin bowling, might barely even register as English. Just two master craftsmen talking about their arcane, esoteric and very possibly dying craft.
Afterwards, when journalists expressed incredulity that these two opposing players would share trade secrets so openly in the middle of a series, Warrican and Jadeja expressed incredulity at their incredulity. “He had some technical doubts,” Jadeja confided. “If your experience helps someone to get better, there cannot be anything better than that.” Warrican put it even more succinctly: “We all play the same sport.”
But let’s get the elephant out of the room first. Why is this respected British news outlet writing about Warrican in the first place? Why, when Manchester United are a shambles and Ange Postecoglou is on the brink and Novak Djokovic is once again winning friends and influencing people, are you polluting the media ecology with this anti-clickbait about a man who might be described – generously – as the fifth most famous spinner from the West Indies?.
I first came across Warrican’s name, if not his face, when he played for West Indies A against England Lions in an unofficial Test series in early 2018. Man, he looked unplayable on those treacherous Cricinfo scorecards: 31 wickets in three Tests, man of the match in all three. I always tried to track his progress after that, resolved to write something about him whenever he did something worth writing about.
Well, it turned into quite a long wait. For a West Indies team with a clear strength (a battery of good pace bowlers) and a clear weakness (a top order liable to fold like a camping chair) there was a strictly limited utility in a conventional finger spinner who didn’t really bat. While the Lions team he demolished went on to greater things – Sam Curran, Ben Foakes, Liam Livingstone, Haseeb Hameed, Jack Leach, Dom Bess – Warrican did not. Roston Chase and Rahkeem Cornwall got the overs. Warrican, meanwhile, could carry a mean drink. Not until 2021 did he play a Test outside Asia.
But all the while Warrican was working on his talent, honing and adapting. Originally he had wanted to be a fast bowler. Of course he did. Growing up in Murray Village in St Vincent, playing around the back of the timber houses, this was what you were supposed to want. But when he moved to Combermere School in Barbados, following his father who was a professor at the University of the West Indies, the cricket master Roddy Estwick asked him – with a strong sense of what the answer might be – to try a few spinners. So was born a romance.