He argued that cricket now revolves around T20, and T20 around data, and that data favours what is easy to measure — runs — over skills that are harder to quantify. Test spin, by contrast, demands time, patience, specialist coaching and investment. The piece set Bashir's situation against a game increasingly organised around Twenty20. Wrist spin and mystery spin have largely disappeared from five-day cricket, Liew wrote, because the returns are disproportionately higher in the shorter format.
The squeeze is not confined to England. In January, Liew wrote, Australia went into the Sydney Test without a spinner for the first time since the 1880s. Nathan Lyon is no longer guaranteed a game for Australia.
Liew traced the rise to a selection built on hunches rather than a long county apprenticeship, including Ben Stokes coming across Bashir's bowling while scrolling social media. He wrote that, in retrospect, that was the moment one of English cricket's stranger recent Test careers was already on borrowed time.
Liew described Bashir as a passenger in the Ashes who was sidelined for most of the home Test series. He wrote that Bashir is most likely to return in some form on England's two-match tour of Bangladesh in February.
The column argued that Bashir's worth as a cricketer rests on a single craft: bowling a spinning red ball, with dip, over long spells, and with fielders around the bat. He delivers his trademark off-break from a high release point.
Careers that once looked secure have also thinned out. Ajaz Patel bowled New Zealand to victory in India two years ago and has played one Test since, Liew wrote.
He was equally dismissive of later signals of faith in the bowler. A suggestion that England's No. 1 red-ball spinner should dovetail with Dan Lawrence was, Liew wrote, no real reassurance. He added that England's national selector does not appear to know Bashir's age.
Match length is working against the craft. A quarter of Tests this decade were over in three days, and fewer than half reached a fifth day, when surfaces are most helpful to spin, the column said.