Toby Roland-Jones: a thrilling throwback to the classic English seamer

Toby Roland-Jones became the first cricketer with a double-barrelled surname to play for England since 1935 when he made his Test bow against South Africa at the Oval last week.

His appearance, though, was a throwback in more ways than one.

Bowling with an action that wouldn’t be far off a coach’s dream, Roland-Jones delivered the kind of back-to-basics performance that wasn’t sexy but was mightily effective.

It was left to Ben Stokes and Moeen Ali to steal the show in a Test that made England’s previous performance at Trent Bridge seem little more than a distant nightmare. Roland-Jones’ debut, meanwhile, was the stuff of dreams.

On a pitch that offered him assistance throughout, the Middlesex man put the ball on the proverbial sixpence and couldn’t have been better value for his match-figures of eight for 129. At a time when more and more emphasis is placed on pace, he once again reminded the Test match lovers of this country that the rudimental skills of the great English seamer are as much a part of the summer as strawberries and cream and Royal Ascot.

No 90mph thunderbolts – just the priceless ability to jag the ball off the seam at a reasonable pace coupled with a nagging line and length that none of the South Africans ever looked comfortable against.

“Since 2005 we’ve focused a lot on pace,” says former England seamer Phil DeFreitas, himself no stranger to the qualities that are so abundant in the 29-year-old new boy.

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“Yes, we had Matthew Hoggard who swung the ball and obviously Jimmy Anderson but there has been more of an emphasis on getting the ball down the other end as quickly as possible.

“Roland-Jones has decent pace but he moves the ball off a classic English length and that was what really stood out for me. He was always making the batsmen play.”

His Monday dismissals of Temba Bavuma and Vernon Philander were a classic illustration of the skills he has brought to this side. Both men were LBW, with Bavuma playing with his bat behind his pad to cover any away movement from the man whose hat-trick sealed the County Championship for Middlesex at Lords last September.

Philander was then all at sea against a fuller delivery first ball – a ball that was idiosyncratic of Roland-Jones’ relentlessly accurate approach from the moment he was thrown the ball by captain Joe Root in the Oval gloom on Friday night.

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DeFreitas grew up at Leicestershire marvelling the skills of Paddy Clift and Ken Higgs, who both worked on the ‘you miss, I hit’ premise. It was one adhered to by others, such as Chris Old, Mike Hendrick and, more latterly, Angus Fraser and Peter Martin.

“Paddy was sharp but he also had great skills, and I don’t think it matters what pace you bowl at if you’ve got those skills,” he says. “Batsmen generally don’t like it if the bowler is always at them, always asking questions and always making them play. They know that if they make a mistake then the bowler is going to capitalise.”

You could argue that until Steve Harmison emerged as one of the world’s fastest bowlers that there had been a natural distrust of truly quick bowlers in English cricket throughout the 1980s and 90s.

The likes of Greg Thomas, who took 10 wickets in five Tests in the mid-80s, and Devon Malcolm, who was dropped more times than he or England would care to remember, are testimony to that.

Since 2005, though, a new bowling arms race has emerged, with Test sides, particularly England and Australia, desperate to out-do each other. Height, rather than the more prosaically traditional English qualities, were the order of the day.

As such, when England headed to Australia for the disastrous tour of 2013 their squad contained three bowlers of 6’7” or over. Broad at 6’5” and Anderson at 6’3” looked like Jimmy Krankie in comparison.

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“I think there’s a good comparison to be made between Toby and Vernon Philander,” says Chris Tremlett, a member of that towering pace attack Down Under four years ago.

“There were plenty of bowlers like that 15 or 20 years ago but I think when Duncan Fletcher came onboard there was more of an emphasis on being able to bowl 85mph or over, especially around the 2005 period. If you couldn’t get the ball up to that kind of pace then you didn’t really stand a chance.”

Tremlett, who played county cricket for Hampshire and Surrey, singles out David Masters of Essex who took 672 wickets at a cost of just 25 during his career as an arch-exponent of the qualities exhibited so ably by Roland-Jones in South London last week.

“Everyone would turn up at Chelmsford and just dread facing him,” he says. “He would only be bowling low to mid 70s (mph) but he knew how to use the new ball. He would hit the seam and get four or five wickets without blinking, really.”

Roland-Jones is appreciably quicker than that but shares the skill-sets that made the likes of Masters, Higgs, Fraser and Brian Statham so uncomfortable to face on English pitches. Even on flatter pitches, the inability of a growing number of batsman to drop anchor and play sensibly could play into Roland-Jones’ hands.

The Aussie tour is still some way off, but it might be wise for him to cancel any prior engagements he had this winter. By the time the Ashes role around, his unfashionable qualities may well be de rigueur.