Mason Crane's inspiration?

James Coyne on the Scottish teenager who went on an England Test tour as the captain’s secretary, but ended up bowling his leg-spin

Mason Crane, who will make his Test debut for England at Sydney, has the spectre of history to overcome. The good news is that many good judges, among them Stuart MacGill, think he has the ability and mental strength to do it.

Picking young spinners for England is not something that has gone well lately. For leg-spinners in particular, the issue of romance often comes into it.

England had gone 21 years without picking a leggie when Ian Salisbury (aged 21) got the nod in 1992 against Pakistan. Virtually the only leg-spinner any English eyes had seen in the intervening 21 years was Abdul Qadir, the bewitching Pakistani.

Similarly, Chris Schofield was just about old enough to drink in an American bar when he debuted in 2000, as the ECB convinced themselves, in the era of Warne and MacGill, that they needed a leggie to compete. Schofield was not a bad cricketer, and showed himself to be a canny T20 bowler further down the line, but he is the one glaring name in the ECB’s first raft of central contracts.

Even Crane’s boss at the Ageas Bowl, Hampshire chairman Rod Bransgrove, told The Cricketer last summer that he would have waited a “year or two” to pick Crane in Test cricket – though he balanced his paternalistic concern with praise, saying he was "very mature, and sound as a pound", and compared his confidence with that of his mate Ian Botham.

Rod thinks Mason will make it someday. He just remembers what happened to England’s last two spinners to make their Test debut in the Ashes: Simon Kerrigan lost his action at The Oval in 2013, and was recently on loan at Northamptonshire; Scott Borthwick played this very fixture four years ago, and has since become a specialist batsman at Surrey, who play on one of the few grounds in England that still encourages spin bowling.

^{Ian Peebles, left, returns an autograph book to a boy fan}

There’s a reason why Pat Pocock is so pissed off that he didn’t play any of his 25 Tests between the ages of 29 and 37 – he knows they were his best years as a bowler. Graeme Swann played all his Tests after 29, and was superb.

It always used to be said that spinners need time to develop at the top level – but how they do that now, in seasons of 14 Championship games, most in dewy and damp April, May and September, goodness only knows.

Crane was picked in the squad not just for this Ashes, but for the West Indies Test series last summer, as a way of gaining experience from being around the senior players.

It is an interesting comparison with the youngest leg-spinner to play Tests for England, Ian Peebles, who was 19 years 338 days old on his Test debut – although in an entirely different era between the wars. (Freddie Brown and 'Young Jack' Hearne, both allrounders, were both marginally younger than Crane’s 20 years 319 days.)

Peebles, a son of the manse, had not yet gone up to Oxford when he ventured down from Aberdeen to Aubrey Faulkner’s cricket school. There he so wowed Pelham Warner that he was shoehorned into the “strong, but not representative” MCC side to tour South Africa in 1927/28.

Warner, the editor of The Cricketer, was no longer a Test selector – indeed, he was invited to be one in 1928, but declined as he would not have been allowed to report on matches in print. He clearly had influence, though.

When asked to pick his fantasy Test, complete with players, umpires and reporters, Jack Fingleton chose Neville Cardus, RC Robertson-Glasgow and Ian Peebles – “and the rest of the world’s press to run their messages and bring them sandwiches”

Peebles actually went on the tour as secretary to the captain. But he bowled well enough that he ended up playing four Tests, taking 34 wickets in all games on the matting pitches they then used in South Africa. (Warner also arranged for Lt-Col RT Stanyforth to go as vice-captain, after the Army wicketkeeper had impressed him on tour in South America the previous winter. Stanyforth ended up captaining England – the only man to do so without being a county player – when GR Jackson of Derbyshire fell ill.)

Warner might have had a point about Peebles, though. He took 100 wickets for Middlesex in 1929, and success for Oxford the next summer saw him recalled to the Test side at Old Trafford, where he duelled with the all-conquering Don Bradman.

The Don was almost bowled by Peebles first ball, then dropped in the slips off him, before he was caught at slip on 14. Alan Kippax was almost out lbw to Peebles with the first three balls he bowled at him.

Somehow he took only 3 for 150. But Peebles lost the venom in his leg-break through over-bowling, and came to rely on his googly – a salutary lesson that there was once too much first-class cricket. He was overlooked for the Bodyline tour, and in 1934, turned down the chance to bowl at Bradman again in the last Test at The Oval.

But Peebles carried on playing until 1948, even after he lost an eye in an air raid during the war. He must have had great fun combining work in the wine trade with cricket journalism in the glory days of Fleet Street, becoming one of the most perceptive writers on the game, especially in analysing cricketers. When asked to pick his fantasy Test, complete with players, umpires and reporters, Jack Fingleton chose Neville Cardus, RC Robertson-Glasgow and Ian Peebles – “and the rest of the world’s press to run their messages and bring them sandwiches”.

And, you suspect that if Mason Crane thrives as a Test bowler, Peebles would have loved to write about him.