Spinners break down too and nobody counts it

Workload management was built around fast bowlers, so the injuries that end slow bowlers' careers go largely unmanaged.

Bowl a spinner into the ground and the sport barely blinks. Forty overs in an innings, back to back Tests, an entire domestic season without a break. The assumption underneath it is that spin does not cost the body much, and the assumption is wrong in ways that are specific and well documented in the treatment room if not in the workload spreadsheet.

The finger goes first for off spinners who genuinely rip the ball. The index finger takes the load of imparting revolutions on a hard object, thousands of times a week, and the joint at the base of it does not enjoy that. Split skin, thickened tissue, then a joint that aches through a whole season. Wrist spinners load the shoulder differently and tend to accumulate problems there and in the lower back, because a big leg break involves a rotation through the trunk that is not far off what a fast bowler does, only repeated more often because the spinner bowls more overs.

Then there is the field. A spinner in a long spell is fielding at mid off between overs and walking back thirty times an over, all day, in heat. That is not a bowling injury. It is a fatigue exposure, and fatigue exposure is what turns a manageable niggle into six weeks out.

The management systems have not caught up because they were designed elsewhere. Fast bowling workload rules exist in part because the consequences of ignoring them are dramatic and expensive, a stress fracture in a twenty two year old, months of rehabilitation, a headline. A spinner's decline is quieter. He loses a little revolution rate, his stock ball drifts less, his figures get worse, and everybody says he has lost his rhythm.

What I would want is boring and achievable. Count deliveries for slow bowlers with the same discipline as for quicks, including net sessions, which is where the finger damage mostly happens. Track revolution rate over a season the way clubs track a fast bowler's speed, because a falling rev count is an early warning rather than a form slump. And be honest that a spinner bowling twenty five overs in a day has done a day's work.

Slow bowlers have been treated as a renewable resource for a century. The good ones are rarer than that.