Ashes 2017: Where now for Moeen Ali? England's want-to-be 'second spinner' to be dropped for Sydney Test

'There's nothing like a good dropping' is one of Trevor Bayliss' favourite phrase - and Moeen is set to discover why

Moeen is set to be dropped for the fifth and final Test in Sydney (Getty)

England went into this Ashes series with an attacking all-rounder at No 6. It just wasn’t the one they wanted. And if these four Tests have taught us anything, it is that if Ben Stokes is the sort of player who thrives on being given more responsibility, Moeen Ali is the sort who thrives on being given less.

Read between the lines of Joe Root’s words after the drawn fourth Test at the MCG, and it appears pretty clear that Moeen’s run of 48 Test matches without being dropped (he missed one game through injury) is coming to an end.

“He’s had a tough tour until now,” Root said. “But there’s no reason why Moeen can’t come back from that. He’s going to do some great things for England in the future.”

And you suspect that if he took a step back, even Moeen would probably say: ‘yeah, fair enough.’ The performances - an average of 19 with the bat and 135 with the ball - have simply not been there for him on this trip, not since a decent couple of knocks with the bat in Brisbane and the wickets of Usman Khawaja and Josh Hazlewood in Australia’s first innings.

Since then, to be blunt, it has been painful to watch. His frantic, hide-behind-the-sofa 14-ball 20 on Thursday was perhaps the nadir: the innings of a player who has mislaid not simply his form, but his basic cricketing identity.

Just a few weeks after ending what was statistically the greatest summer of his Test career, Moeen is on the verge of losing his England place. And the thesis here is that the blame lies just as much with England as it does with Moeen.

The first thing to say is that Australia is no place for a visiting off-spinner. Even the best of them have struggled here: Graeme Swann averaged 53. Ravi Ashwin 55, Harbhajan Singh (who tormented Australia in home conditions) 73, Muttiah Muralitharan 75, Saeed Ajmal 111. With the best will in the world, Moeen is not really in their class. What did we really think was going to happen?

Added to which, his preparations were hampered by a side strain. A gashed finger in Brisbane affected his ability to impart spin. Before he had even delivered a ball, Moeen was going into this series with history, conditions and injury conspiring against him. But that wasn’t the half of it.

There were chuckles throughout the room when Moeen walked in after taking a hat-trick at The Oval last summer and quipped that he still considered himself a second spinner. In truth, it was not so wide of the mark. The selection of Liam Dawson for the Lord’s Test against South Africa was an indication of how England were beginning to see Moeen evolving as a bowler: away from long dry spells and into a more niche, attacking role.

The tour of India, and in a sense the two years preceding it, had shown that Moeen was not the sort of bowler who could wheel away all day keeping things tight. And so Root and Moeen hatched a new identity for him, as a sort of strike spinner or partnership-breaker: operating in short aggressive bursts, worrying more about taking wickets than going for runs. The results were immediate and spectacular: 30 wickets at 21 in the summer, the first hat-trick by an England spinner for 80 years.

Ali has averaged 19 with the bat and 135 with the ball (Getty)

The key player in making this role work was Stokes. In many ways, Stokes and Moeen formed ideal counterweights to each other: with Stokes pulling his weight as a fourth seamer, Moeen had licence to attack with the ball, and with Moeen as the insurance policy at No 8, Stokes had licence to attack with the bat. It was a formula that served England well all summer, and was all set to be unleashed on the Australians in the winter.

Well, we all know what happened next. The absence of Stokes following his Bristol nightclub incident thrust Moeen into the role of the side’s only all-rounder. He had prospered batting at No 4 in India, and at No 3 for Worcestershire. But the figures suggest he does his best work lower down the order: taking advantage of tiring attacks, shifting the tempo, scoring quickly. More gravely, the presence of an inexperienced fourth seamer placed greater onus on Moeen to bowl long spells and keep things tight.

Again, we all know what happened next. Over recent years, following his spectacular entrance to Test cricket in 2014, teams have learned how to play Moeen. They do not try and hit him out of the attack; instead, they simply milk him for runs, wait for the bad ball, push the field back until he is simply ineffective as a bowling option. It is striking how little Australia have tried to hit him for six this series. They haven’t needed to.

The success of Nathan Lyon has thrown his own struggles into sharp relief. Lyon, like many Australian off-spinners, put a higher number of revolutions on the ball, using a combination of over-spin and side-spin to extract maximum bounce and dip. Cricviz data this series has shown that while Moeen gets far more drift - which comes earlier in the delivery and is therefore easier to counter - Lyon has extracted far more turn. Moeen, who has now been dismissed by Lyon six times out of seven, has seen that at first hand.

Moeen has failed too many time with bat and ball this series and could do with a 'dropping' (Getty)

And so Moeen’s confidence - fragile at the best of times, owing to the fact that he never really expected to be England’s No 1 spinner, or perhaps even play for England at all - has gradually been eroded to nothing. At Melbourne, he bowled just two maiden overs in the match. “I felt for Mo today,” Graeme Swann said after play. “He’s not bowling with any vigour, there’s no energy on the ball. Mentally, he’s completely shot.

“There was so little energy through his action, and in the crease. And Joe just hasn’t bowled him. When he’s bowled, there’s been a deep mid-wicket, a long-on and a deep cover. That says to me, ‘we don’t think you’re just going to go in one area, we think you can be cut, driven or pulled’.”

And yet it is hard to lay the responsibility for this squarely at the feet and hands of Moeen, a cricketer with an unimpeachable attitude who has clearly made the most of his assorted talents. In a way, perhaps the reason Moeen has struggled to define himself as a cricketer is that England have utterly failed to define him: first spinner, second spinner, dry spinner, strike spinner, lower-order hitter, middle-order stroke-player, makeshift opener. Moeen has been messed around more than any other England cricketer of his generation, and so it is perhaps unsurprising that in the toughest test of his career, he looks as if he has no idea what is required of him.

What happens next? Mason Crane is likely to play at Sydney, while Moeen will have a one-day series to try and get his mojo back. It is just two white-ball innings ago, remember, that he struck a brilliant 53-ball century at Bristol, a reminder that for all his troubles, he is simply too talented a cricketer to be away from the side for long.

One of coach Trevor Bayliss’ favourite phrases is “There’s nothing like a good dropping”. And while a short break from the side would be a crushing disappointment to Moeen in the short-term, in the long term, it might well be in his best interests. Time away from the game, time to think, time to breathe. Time to reflect, perhaps, on the sort of cricketer he wants to be.