Achievement within achievement

Hidden amongst the impassioned outpourings about England's loosening grip on a 6 year unbeaten run and the continuing rumbles about boorish sledging and jelly-bean related activities came another announcement. As with many of his greatest achievements in a distinguished international career, it was significant yet swamped under a mound of more trumpeted stories. The retirement of Ashley Giles from all cricket had been largely anticipated after a degenerative hip problem allowed him only two batches of two Tests following the 2005 Ashes had been largely anticipated and almost a decade after he made his Test debut alongside the likes of Atherton, Hussain, Knight and Fraser, he is now set to join them in the commentary and press boxes.

England's last two long-serving left-arm spinners were very much peas in a pod; highly talented, maverick, Middlesex men, Edmonds and Tufnell were the best slow bowlers of their time, but both managed to upset the establishment and were never firmly ensconced in the fold. Giles came as a polar opposite: less naturally gifted, his all round talents, steady slow left-arm supplemented by trenchant batting and safe-as houses gully fielding, found him favour in Duncan Fletcher's Team England. You wouldn't expect to find Giles relieving his boredom by reading a newspaper on the field, or being accused of smoking weed in a New Zealand cafe.

Another fact which differentiated Giles from his predecessors is that his career coincided with one of England's most successful periods in Test cricket for quite some time. And while that sentence seems fairly anonymous, in fact the wording of it is extremely loaded and is the nub of the argument which raged - boringly as do most sagas related to English cricket - throughout his 52 Test career. His detractors always argued that he was a passenger: untalented and utilised only to fill a hole in an otherwise seamless XI. The favourite paradigm of the naysayer was that he maintained his place only because there was no-one better, while he did little to fight their principal doubt regarding his effectiveness by pursuing a consistent over-the-wicket line of attack.

Yet a brief perusal of the greatest successes of that glory period, now seemingly at an end, reveals the name of Giles to be a constant recurrence at all the most important stages. The series victory in Pakistan seven years ago, the first major triumph of the Fletcher-Hussain axis, featured an impressive 17 wickets from the man in question, while his fellow spinner Ian Salisbury managed just 1 in the 3 Tests. And while the Karachi Test will be forever remembered for its dramatic conclusion, too easily forgotten is the the crucial contribution of Giles, namely dismissing the often immovable feast Inzamam with a peach of a delivery, the sort which he replicated several times in later years, pitching outside leg and spinning past the bat to hit off. This sparked a frenzied Pakistan collapse, paving the way for England's twilight run-chase after Mike Atherton's painstaking 9 hour century had given England first-innings parity.

As with every cricketer who played that summer, the 2005 Ashes was his crowning achievement, one which went not without his own significant influence. The reason why England will not win the Ashes is because while Australia have Shane Warne, England can only present Ashley Giles as their best spin option. That was the line most cognoscenti were trotting out while England were sweeping up each of the 7 Tests in the 2004 summer. If England could just find a really top-drawer spinner, they might have a chance. And the comparison between the two is somewhat stark: indeed Giles took exactly a quarter of Warne's monumental haul that summer, and in the previous home Ashes series, Simon Hughes became a laughing stock amongst his Channel 4 colleagues just for the intimation that Giles and Warne were similar, in that they turned the ball the same way. But England did not need Giles to be like Warne; granted, they would have gladly accepted a superior attacking leg-spinner, but Giles' role was markedly different from the Australian's. As for much of his career, he plugged away gamely at one end, restricting the scoring and creating pressure for the formidable pace attack to capitalise on. Bowlers, like batsmen, work in pairs, and while Giles may not have bagged so many scalps for his own collection, a measure of wickets he helped bring about at the other end would have him in healthy credit. And while Kevin Pietersen is rightly hailed as the hero of the hour at The Oval, acting as England's Horatius in the face of the Australian onslaught, the contribution of Giles, with a patient half-century, ensured absolute safety and the recapture of the urn. Yet again, he was playing a small yet important and ultimately overshadowed role in a major team triumph.

Between times, he showed himself more than capable of making some headlines of his own, capturing 22 wickets in the 4 match series against West Indies in 2004, including the wicket of Brian Lara memorably at Lord's, with one of his ripsnorting specials. But it was not always for his own success that Giles became front-page news. On a difficult tour of India in 2001, his bowling attack depleted, Nasser Hussain was forced to test the boundaries of his formidable inventiveness; part of this involved Giles eschewing the traditional left-arm spinner's line of attack and bowl over the wicket into the deep rough which had developed. It succeeded in locating a depth to the patience of Tedulkar, stumped for the first time in his career in an attempt to break the shackles. It also caused a hue and cry in the press and from some fans: Hussain fit the bill nicely as the villain of the piece, being probably the most determined English captain since Douglas Jardine, although the mob found it hard to place Giles as successor to Larwood. So they settled for calling him boring, bland and ineffective, a far easier pigeon hole to stuff him in

Quite where Giles truly fits in between the extremist summaries of the adoring and the atheists is hard to say. A bowling average in excess of 40 in a Test career which stretched beyond 50 games is a slight anomaly and betrays the truth that Giles was no exceptional bowler, barely even excellent. There were also occasions on which he was expected to perform in favourable conditions and failed, such as on the last day of the Old Trafford Ashes Test in 2005, where he erred constantly in both length and line and went wicketless. A batting mark of over 20 goes some way to explaining his durability, as does the continued assertion that he was a good team-man, something which is easy to discredit from the outside, but which was valued highly by his fellows.

England have been fortunate that the tailing off of Giles' career has coincided with the emergence of a greater bowling talent in Monty Panesar. Panesar is without doubt the better bowler; he imparts greater turn and is an equal of Giles in terms of control. Therefore the uproar which followed the senior man's selection for the first two Ashes Tests last winter was somewhat understandable. In the end, it helped nobody: Giles had not played any sort of cricket for a year, and had remodelled his action into an ungainly trot, a shadow of the formerly graceful wheeling approach, and indicative of his slide into sporting infirmity. Below his best, he managed just two wickets in as many games before he was forced to return home to care for his wife, suffering from a brain tumour. Sadly, the abiding memory of his tour will be the dropped catch off Ricky Ponting in the first innings at Adelaide, which time has shown was an excruciatingly costly miss. In a rather ironic reflection of his earlier career, England's fortunes spiralled with his own, just as they had flourished with him in the first part of the decade. And for a man derided as a passenger throughout his career, perhaps the greatest compliment that can now be paid is that England are struggling without him.