At the start of the summer Jack Leach found himself out of the Test side and not sure how much fun he was having. The previous year had been ruined by a stress fracture of his back, the start of this one by a knee injury, and just as he returned to first-team cricket he fielded a call from Brendon McCullum telling him he was not going to be in England’s next Test squad. “After a long time out with injury,” he said, “I felt that might be it.”
Now he is back in the team and back in Rawalpindi, where on his last visit he took what he considers “probably my favourite wicket” to win the first Test of the 2022 series against Pakistan, and where in the build-up to Thursday’s series decider, ground staff are busy cooking up a pitch they hope will suit their own spinners but might just help their opponents’ too.
In between he had one of his best English summers, taking 45 wickets at 22.77 in the County Championship. “It was just getting back to remembering what I’m about and being happy with that,” he said. “When I first came into the England team, it’s great and then you kind of think: ‘What do I need to do to be better?’ It’s quite a fine line between trying to get better and trying to change. Sometimes I was guilty of trying to change, and then you forget what your main strengths are. This summer provided a really good opportunity to simplify everything: just do what I’m good at.”
Initially there was little contact from the England set-up as he set about rebuilding his confidence. “I didn’t need a lot of words from them, I felt there was a lot of stuff I just needed to do for myself,” he said. “From there, what would happen would happen.”
That changed in July, when Shoaib Bashir, the then 20-year-old who had become both his county understudy and his Test replacement, took a five-fer as England beat West Indies at Trent Bridge, and Ben Stokes decided that Leach could do with some reassurance. That evening England’s captain picked up the phone from the team hotel. “I felt really happy and proud,” Leach said of that call. “He just wanted to tell me how great I was basically, in the way that he does, and just recognise how I’ve dealt with the situation.
“That gave me a chance to say some nice things back to him about what he’d given me, probably going back to 2019 at Headingley. He gave me that moment. I think there’s just a mutual respect there, so it was a nice conversation to have for sure. It just reminded me that I was going about things in the right way and gave me confidence I still had something to offer the team and I was part of it in a small way. That gave me good motivation for the remainder of the summer, I’d say. It was a nice reminder that there was still a chance to play.”
From there, and in the knowledge that this trip to Pakistan would present a possible way back into the squad, the 33-year-old set about trying to play without pressure. “It’s just making sure you’re enjoying the actual game rather than what comes with it,” he said. “It’s great playing for England and to be part of that team, then the injuries happened and you find yourself really down about it. Why am I here? I just felt I needed to rediscover the kid-like mentality of why you play the game. You have that on your journey up to playing for England, that nothing-to-lose mentality, then it’s like: ‘I’m here now, I want to keep that.’ It’s tiring, it’s stressful, it’s not enjoyable.
“But the upsides, the opportunity, all the things Baz talks to us about – I felt like I loved all those things but maybe I was being a bit of a fraud, in terms of enjoying them but not actually living by them. I had an opportunity over the summer, as an individual, to live by them a little bit more. I tried to do that, and it certainly made me enjoy the game more.”
That sense of joy has survived the potentially awkward experience of working with Bashir, in the knowledge that England have identified the now 21-year-old as a key player for both the present and the future, and the repercussions of that for Leach.
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“It’s been a whirlwind journey for him,” Leach said. “I guess it was two years ago when he was trialling at Somerset and I remember having a conversation with [the former wicketkeeper] Steve Davies, who I was very close to at Somerset, and he was like: ‘There’s this off-spinner and he’s proper.’ And I’d seen him and I said: ‘I love his action, it looks amazing.’ We were like, ‘We’ve got to sign him.’
“That obviously happened and his rise has been amazing. He’ll just be learning so much so quickly. He’s quality. We have a good relationship. I try and help where I can. I don’t want to overload him with stuff, I feel he’s just learning through playing and it’s all going to come quite naturally.”
If the ground staff have their way both spinners will be key to England’s chances of victory this week. Leach acknowledges that “there’s different mental pressures definitely with playing on more helpful surfaces as a spinner”; his most important task could be protecting them both from those.
