Left-arm spinners

[Smudge]

Nah, New Zealand. Nick Beard

Good Albion lad too, from Dunedin. I've been hugely impressed by what I've seen of him on telly, and he's shouldered a heavy workload in the FC stuff it seems, taking wickets along the way.

 

[Richard]

I wouldn't say so.

It's hard for spinners, period. Given that 1 out of 10 people in the population is left handed, the lack of really good left hand spinners (in the long form anyway) isn't something to be overly concerned about.

Broadly speaking, there's no doubt that, on a turning pitch against a batting line-up which is in majority RHBs, a stock-standard left-arm fingerspinner is at an advantage over a stock-standard right-arm fingerspinner - the ball which turns away is harder to counter than the one which turns in. Nonetheless, a good-quality right-arm and left-arm fingerspinner will cause RHBs and LHBs problems on a turning deck - it's as simple as that.

On a non-turning deck, no fingerspinner, right-arm or left-arm, will cause any undue difficulties to good-quality batsmen.

As far as wristspinners are concerned, I'd say the right-arm\left-arm minority\majority is easily large enough, and the difficulty of wristspin easily hard enough, that the fact that there's never been a specialist left-arm wristspin bowler of any note isn't extraordinarily surprising.

Decades have gone by without any wristspinner of any tremendous note playing Test cricket. That's how hard a style it is to master.