Anderson's Warning: England Need a Spinner for the Ashes — and They Need One Now

 

James Anderson has been retired from international cricket for nearly two years. He plays for Lancashire in county cricket, makes occasional appearances for the Manchester Originals in The Hundred, and has settled into the role of fast bowling mentor that the ECB offered him when they ended his Test career in July 2024. He speaks carefully and without bitterness about a career that ended before he felt ready for it to end. He is not, by any measure, a man who looks for reasons to criticise the England setup that let him go.

Which is why what he said on the BBC's Tailenders Podcast about England's Ashes tactics carries weight that a more politically motivated voice would not. Anderson is not grinding an axe. He is a 704-wicket Test bowler who watched England lose 3-0 in Australia last winter and saw, with a seamer's eye, exactly what went wrong — and why the same mistake could happen again if England do not address it before the 2027 Ashes series at home.

"The all-pace attack 100% worked in the first innings," Anderson said. "We landed a few blows." And then came the qualification. "But Head knew they were bowling short, so he just sat on the back foot and hit his areas." The problem was not the strategy in isolation. The problem was that England had no alternative once Australia's batters adapted to it. "I just wonder whether we lack a nuance — a bit of something different and a change of pace, whether that is a spinner or a slightly different pacer. There was no frontline spinner to just bowl four overs."

That is the critique. Now let us look at whether it is correct — and what it means for where England go from here.

What Actually Happened in Australia

England arrived in Australia for the 2025-26 Ashes with what McCullum and the selectors believed was their strongest available seam attack. They were without James Anderson — retired since 2024 — but they had Gus Atkinson, Brydon Carse, Josh Tongue, and Mark Wood. The plan was to bowl short and hard, exploit Australia's middle order against pace on bouncy Australian pitches, and use the conditions that Anderson himself had often found so difficult in his own Ashes tours.

In the first innings of Brisbane, it worked. Australia were put under genuine pressure. Travis Head — who had tormented England in 2023 with an aggressive counter-attack that made the short-pitched plan look naive — was dismissed for a modest score. England had Australia in trouble.

Then came the second innings, and Anderson's point became the post-series headline. Head made 87 off 59 balls. He simply sat back and hit everything pitched short. Once he had clocked the length, he was never troubled by it again — because England's seamers could not change the plan. There was no spinner to slow the over rate, change the angle, bowl to the rough, and force the right-handers to play in a way they were less comfortable with. England's all-pace attack, which had looked like a strength in the first innings, became a limitation the moment Australia's best player identified and neutralised the central idea.

England lost the series 3-0. They came home to a New Zealand series that they lost 2-1. They ended the summer with Ben Stokes retired, the WTC ranking at 7th, and an Ashes series in England in 2027 looming on the horizon. As we explored in our three-year Bazball review, the bowling attack's inability to take 20 wickets against the strongest opposition has been the single most persistent problem of the Stokes-McCullum era. Anderson's critique connects directly to that pattern.

The Spinner Question — England's Most Complicated Debate

Anderson's specific point about a frontline spinner is the most interesting part of his analysis, because it is also the most contested. England's position on spin bowling in Test cricket has been deliberately aggressive since 2022 — they have picked Jack Leach selectively, used Shoaib Bashir in specific conditions, and leaned on the pace quartet as the primary attacking option in almost all conditions. The results in England have been strong. Spin on English pitches in summer conditions is rarely decisive anyway. But in Australia — where pitches deteriorate from day three onwards, where the rough outside the right-hander's off stump becomes a weapon in the second innings — the absence of a high-quality frontline spinner is a genuine tactical gap.

Stuart Broad, speaking around the same time as Anderson, added his own layer. He pointed to Travis Head's method specifically — the way Head identified that England were bowling short and simply relocated his back foot, playing everything off the back of a length. England's seamers, once Head had cracked the plan, had no variation to offer. A spinner — bowling flatter, slower, potentially into rough — would have presented a fundamentally different problem. England had no such option available.

The counterargument, made by those who defend the all-pace approach, is that England's spinners have not been good enough to justify the selection on bowling merit alone. Shoaib Bashir has shown promise but is not yet ready to be England's primary attacking spinner on Ashes pitches. Jack Leach has been in and out of the side for three years and has never quite nailed down the kind of consistency that would make him automatic. The problem, in other words, is not just tactical — it is that England do not have the spinner to execute the plan Anderson is describing.

Which brings us to Rehan Ahmed. The leg-spinner, who made his Test debut at 18 under the Bazball selection philosophy — an approach we discussed when looking at how England and India have both embraced backing young talent — is currently the most exciting spin option England have. He is 22. He took wickets in Pakistan on debut. He has played sporadically since. If Anderson's critique is correct, the urgency around Rehan Ahmed's development becomes the most pressing bowling selection issue in English cricket right now — more immediate, in some ways, than the captaincy question.

What McCullum Must Answer

Brendon McCullum is still England's head coach. He survived the Ashes review. He survived the New Zealand series defeat. He has the backing of Rob Key and — for now — the ECB. But as we noted in our piece on Harry Brook's captaincy prospects, the post-Stokes era requires McCullum to do something he has not yet had to do in four years as head coach: build something new rather than maintaining something established. Stokes was the emotional and tactical foundation of everything that worked. The bowling philosophy was as much Stokes' instinct as it was McCullum's design.

Without Stokes as captain, McCullum now has to answer Anderson's question directly. Not in a press conference — in a selection decision, a training programme, a development pathway. The answer to "do England need a frontline spinner for the 2027 Ashes?" is almost certainly yes. The answer to "which spinner, and how do we get them ready in 12 months?" is the harder question — and it is the one that McCullum needs to solve before England announce their Ashes squad next year.

There is also a broader tactical implication that Anderson's critique raises. England under Stokes and McCullum became the best attacking team in the world in favourable conditions. The Ashes 2023 series — 2-2 at home, a moral victory if not a trophy — showed they could compete at the highest level. But every series away from home against top opposition since 2022 has produced the same result: England's plan is identified, countered, and they have nothing in reserve. India 4-1. Australia 3-0. The pattern is consistent enough to be a structural problem rather than a sequence of unlucky results.

Anderson's Deeper Point

What makes Anderson's comments more than a retired player criticising his former team is the specific nature of the observation. He is not saying England bowled badly. He is not saying the all-pace approach was wrong in principle. He is saying that without variety — without something the opposition cannot simply sit back and counter — England's attack becomes predictable the moment a batter of Travis Head's quality works out what they are doing.

That is a bowling coach's observation, made with a bowling coach's precision. Anderson knows better than almost anyone alive what it feels like to operate as the change of pace in an England attack — to bowl 70mph away-swing after Stuart Broad has been hitting the pitch at 85mph, and to watch batters suddenly unable to find their rhythm. The disruption of variety is not just tactical — it is psychological. It forces batters to reset, to make decisions at different speeds, to commit to shots at different tempos. An all-pace attack, however hostile, allows a settled batter to find one rhythm and stay there.

England will host Australia in 2027. The series will define whatever era succeeds Bazball — and the new captain, whoever it is, will be defined by that result more than any other. The bowling attack that takes the field in that first Test needs to be better than the one that lost 3-0 in Brisbane in December 2025. Anderson has identified, clearly and specifically, the most important thing that needs to change. Whether McCullum and the new captain act on it is the question that the next 12 months of English cricket will answer.

Do you think Anderson is right that England need a frontline spinner for the 2027 Ashes? And is Rehan Ahmed the answer — or does England need to find someone else entirely? Drop your thoughts in the comments.