By the end of the session even I, a sometime off-spinner with the guile of Giant Haystacks, can see that he has improved all his charges. In fine Aussie tradition, however, he pulls no punches.”You’re six foot two but you’ve got the delivery stride of a bloke of four foot nine,” he tells one lad, who blushes cricket-ball red.And yet he bonds with them, making them feel that as leg-spinners they all belong to a select if somewhat victimised brotherhood. “Our bad balls are worse than everyone else’s bad balls,” he says, with laboured irony “The body language tells us so.”He elaborates. When a quickie’s long hop is despatched to the boundary, the exhortation is a bullish “come on Freddie!” But when a leggie drops one short and is hammered for four, his team-mates hang their heads forlornly, unsupportively.
Jenner cites the example of one of his former pupils, South Africa’s Paul Adams, hit for 30 in three overs against Sri Lanka. The quick bowlers were plundered just as mercilessly, he says, and yet Adams was not bowled in the second innings and was dropped altogether for the next Test.”That’s what we have to endure as leg-spin bowlers,” he says There is a murmur of assent. In centuries gone by, Jenner would have persuaded these lads to overthrow the bourgeoisie.For all his talk of unappreciative team-mates, though, and the “atrocious” treatment suffered by the average club leg-spinner, Jenner happily concedes that his prot? Warne has, single-wristedly, made leg-spin sexy.”Two years ago he became the most six-hit bowler in the history of Test cricket, so it’s not that he doesn’t take punishment. But there are now thousands of kids out there trying to do what he does, because for a while he had no peer not only as a bowler but as a Test cricketer. Telling people ‘Warne’s on’ was almost like saying ‘Bradman’s in’. In Australia housewives and grandmothers didn’t put the kettle on when Warne was bowling, they waited until the fast bowlers were on.
It used to be the other way round.” Merseyside’s would-be Warnes have left the gym now, and only Jenner and I remain. Needless to say, he is delighted that his boy is in the Ashes squad, and confidently, almost provocatively, predicts a successful series for Australia.”What has happened to England recently is outstanding, and what India did to Australia, a lot of that stuff’s good A weak England is not good for Test cricket Nor is a weak West Indies. So I hope the Ashes will be competitive, but first you’ve got Pakistan, don’t forget, and then it’s the moment of truth. I like to assess how it might go by working out which England players would get into the Australian side, and I reckon I could just about get a game for Thorpe.” Jenner grins He is enjoying himself “Work it out yourself by lining up the two teams I love watching Gough bowl, but he’s not McGrath.
