Where have all the wristspinners gone in Test cricket?

Only in six of the last 15 completed years have wristspinners bowled at least 15% of all spinners’ overs in Test cricket. Those six years, unsurprisingly, were those in which Yasir Shah played at least five Tests. Yasir is by far the most prolific wristspinner of the post-Warne period, with 244 wickets at 31.38.

Hasn’t it always been this way, though? The history of wristspin in Test cricket is a spotty one. There have been eras of plenty – such as the first decade of the 1900s, which produced the South African googly quartet (Reggie Schwarz, Aubrey Faulkner, Bert Vogler and Gordon White) or the 1930s, when Australia could call upon not just Clarrie Grimmett and Bill O’Reilly but also the left-armer Chuck Fleetwood-Smith, and the 1990s, when Warne, Anil Kumble and Mushtaq Ahmed flourished alongside Paul Adams. But these periods have always been separated by long fallow phases. Of the 72 full-time spinners with at least 100 Test wickets, only 15 have exclusively bowled wristspin (Johnny Wardle bowled both kinds of left-arm spin).Wristspin droughts, then, aren’t uncommon; what’s different about the one we’re living through is that wristspin is everywhere in the shorter formats.

As the chart shows, wristspinners bowled a relatively comparable percentage of overs in Tests and white-ball cricket until around 2014 (they actually bowled a marginally higher share of spin overs in Tests than in ODIs between Full Members that year). Then, somewhere around the time of the crackdown on the doosra, when the actions of the likes of Saeed Ajmal and Sunil Narine began coming under increasing scrutiny, wristspin became an increasingly popular weapon in white-ball cricket. There was, however, no concurrent uptick in Tests.The reasons aren’t hard to fathom. Wristspin is the most complicated way to deliver a cricket ball, and by extension, the most error-prone way. Whatever it gains over fingerspin in terms of revs on the ball and bite off the pitch, it often loses in terms of control.There are times when this trade-off is worth it to teams, and times when it isn’t. Take the example of India in the aftermath of their defeat in the 2017 Champions Trophy final. They identified that they weren’t getting wickets through the middle overs of ODIs, and sought to remedy that by replacing the fingerspin duo of R Ashwin and Ravindra Jadeja with a pair of wristspinners, Kuldeep Yadav and Yuzvendra Chahal.Related

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This was part of a wider trend. Teams began prizing middle-overs wickets in 50-overs cricket, where pitches were tending to offer minimal grip and turn; and in T20s they began to favour match-up-resistant spinners capable of turning the ball in both directions. It’s no coincidence that fingerspinners who have stayed relevant in white-ball cricket in this time have either tended to develop other deliveries to get through unfavourable match-ups, or happened to contribute with the bat, or both. If not, they have become bit-part players who only feature on turning tracks, or when opposition line-ups are unusually full of left- or right-hand batters.

Fingerspinners have continued to dominate Test cricket, however, to the extent that wristspin barely exists at all. The fundamental reason is that the bar for control for Test bowlers is significantly higher than the bar in white-ball cricket. The ball that defines Test cricket remains the one that makes the batter defend off the front foot and worry about bowled, lbw and catches off either edge. The best bowlers, of any kind, tend to be those who force batters to come forward and defend the ball more often than others. Wickets can and do accrue from attacking shots, but batters usually aren’t under obligation to play those shots: the best Test bowlers tend to force batters into attacking out of sheer desperation, from feeling that they have run out of other run-scoring options.Only a handful of wristspinners, through history, have exacted this kind of control over line and length. This is why so many successful white-ball wristspinners – Brad Hogg and Adil Rashid, for example – have failed to make much of a dent in Test cricket, and why so few wristspinners have enjoyed long careers at Test level.And over the last decade or so, conditions in Test cricket have further minimised wristspin’s relevance. Test-match pitches around the world, particularly in the World Test Championship era, have tended to extremes of bowler-friendliness, offering either so much seam movement that spinners become superfluous or so much variable turn that fast, accurate fingerspin becomes deadly. Wristspinners can look out of place in both those habitats; their point of difference is most apparent when pitches are flat and true. It’s when the fast-medium bowler and the fingerspinner are reduced to waiting for wickets that the tearaway quick and the world-class wristspinner become indispensable.It’s no coincidence that Pakistan, a land defined by unforgivingly flat Test pitches for many generations, has produced so many wristspinners and express, reverse-swinging quicks. It’s a sign of the times that Pakistan, over recent months, have made a conscious switch from flat tracks to square turners, and that their two key figures in home Tests, Sajid Khan and Noman Ali, are both fingerspinners. Since their recall to the side in October, Sajid and Noman have sent down nearly 81% of Pakistan’s deliveries at home, and at one point bowled unchanged for 89.5 overs across three innings spanning eight days and two cities.Against that backdrop, the legspinners Pakistan picked, Zahid Mahmood and Abrar Ahmed, ended up as third spinners in every sense of the term, utilised for only 49.5 overs across four Tests, with Zahid going unused in two innings. It was, in a way, symbolic of wristspin’s wider decline in Test cricket.For all that, though, this drought is a little deceptive, because you could argue that the two best wristspinners since Warne’s retirement – certainly the only two with more than 40 wickets at sub-30 averages – are not just active currently but hugely influential when they get on the field in whites.

It’s not Rashid Khan’s fault that Afghanistan’s Test appearances are limited and lack the halo of WTC status, but he has already delivered one of the great Test performances of 2025, picking up 11 wickets across 55 overs in Bulawayo. It was his third 11-for in Test cricket. The second, in March 2021, was even better, coming on an Abu Dhabi highway where Afghanistan batted first and declared on 545 for 4. Thereafter, Rashid’s persistent menace was all that stopped that match from ending up as a draw: he delivered 36.3 overs in Zimbabwe’s first innings and an incredible 62.5 in their second, all while carrying an injury to the middle finger of his bowling hand.It’s hard to say how many Tests Rashid will add to the six he’s played so far, and how many wickets to his 45 at 20.44, but it’s clear whenever he plays that the ingredients that make him so dangerous in white-ball cricket work just as well in Tests: pace through the air, a relentless, stump-to-stump line, buzzing overspin that produces dip and bounce, and a legbreak and wrong’un that are virtually indistinguishable.Kuldeep is a different sort of wristspinner, slower and more reliant on deception through the air, and his red-ball appearances have also been limited by circumstance – chiefly that of being an Indian spinner in the time of Ashwin and Jadeja (and Axar Patel and Washington Sundar). But his record is hugely impressive – 56 wickets at 22.16 – and his selection, following India’s defeat in the first Test, was key to their 4-1 win over England’s Bazballers last year. Kuldeep was India’s best spinner through that series, showing both control and attacking potency on good batting surfaces, and whetting the appetite for what he could do on Australian pitches later in the year; injury, sadly, ruled him out of that tour. What the future holds for Kuldeep remains to be seen; he has the tools to be India’s No. 1 spinner home and away for a number of years, but they also happen to have a wealth of fingerspin options who bat.It’s a weird time for wristspin in Test cricket, then. You could argue that the craft has been marginalised like never before, or that it’s simply as marginal as it has been through most of the sport’s history. Or you could say that it’s actually in great health, if only its most beguiling practitioners could play more often.