Transpose the seamers and the story would probably be the same. Do so with the spinners and Australia might well be in the ascendant – Graeme Swann is that influential
Graeme Swann is on track to be not just England’s, but one of the game’s, greatest ever spin bowlers. Photograph: Stu Forster/Getty Images
Spin them how you like, twist them until they look like a DNA double helix but in the end statistics can tell a story. In this series, after three Tests, they are revealing both similarities and differences between the sides.
Ian Bell, for instance, stands head and shoulders above any other batsman, with the possible exception of Michael Clarke, and is unmatched for consistency. Closest for England is Joe Root and 180 of his 242 runs have come in a single knock, while Stuart Broad has more runs than Alastair Cook and Jonathan Trott, and averages more than any other England batsman beyond Bell and Root.
Of the seam bowlers, Ryan Harris and Peter Siddle have outbowled their England counterparts significantly. Harris, brilliant, has 11 wickets from two Tests at 18 runs apiece and Siddle, an industry all on his own, has 16 at 21.68. Only Jimmy Anderson comes close for England, with 15 wickets at 26, but he had one of his least productive games for England at Old Trafford, where both Australian seamers excelled.
England's three other seamers in this series – Steve Finn, Tim Bresnan, and Broad – have only as many wickets as Anderson between them, and at a cost that might put them on the shelves in Harrods rather than Lidl. There has been a great deal of mediocrity from both sides in this series.
If England have the upper hand in any area, though, it is with their use of and success with spin. Here the differential is huge.
Australia's spinners have taken seven wickets for 442 runs, four of those going to the occasional legspinner Steve Smith who got lucky once. It means that the two front-line spinners, Ashton Agar and Nathan Lyon, have three wickets between them, costing 111 runs each.
On the same pitches Graeme Swann and, briefly, Root have managed 22 at 23.4 each, 19 of them to Swann.
Only in the maiden-overs column, where the Australia spinners have sent down 30 to England's 29, and from 43 fewer overs, do they have the upper hand – and that most likely is a function of the fields that have been set. Swann is the single player who is making a difference. Transpose the seamers and the story would be the same, probably more so. Do so with the spinners and Australia might well be in the ascendent – he is that influential.
Perhaps it is unfair to compare his figures with those of a teenager elevated to the heights with the rapidity of an ejector seat (although Dan Vettori, for example, managed well enough) or someone whose perceived weakness, despite a perfectly credible career, meant that no Australian had played as many Tests as Lyon had before Old Trafford without one against England. But Swann has moved beyond the stage of being merely a phenomenon and is on track to be not only England's greatest spin bowler, but one of the game's greatest.
At the moment he has 241 wickets from 55 matches, which places him 11th in a list of wicket-taking spinners, headed of course by Muttiah Muralitharan, with 800, then Shane Warne, 708, and Anil Kumble (619).
These are players surely out of reach for all time and perhaps, for Swann, Harbhajan Singh, 413, too. But the rest – from Vettori (360) down to Bhagwat Chandrasekhar (242), are within range. More pertinently, he is closing in on Derek Underwood's England record of 297 wickets as a spinner.
What is surprising is that of those 10 spinners with more wickets than he, his career average of 28.41 is bettered only by Murali (22.72), Warne (25.41) and Underwood (25.83), and this playing half his cricket on generally seam-orientated English pitches.
Indeed sometimes it is hard to understand quite what it is that elevates Swann above other bowlers. There is no mystery to him, no doosra or carrom ball. He is an orthodox finger spinner, not back of the hand like Warne, Kumble, Danish Kaneria or Chandra; or a double-jointed physical freak of nature as Murali has been.
He spins the ball hugely for a finger spinner – about 2,500 revs, according to the TV spinometer – but then Lyon gets close to that, too.
With the spin comes drift away from the direction of turn (physicists can explain that one) and thus he can beat the outside of the bat as well as inside. This, despite his late entry into the Test arena (which given what has happened is as baffling as anything else about him) is a thoroughly modern DRS savvy bowler, whose enviable record against left-handers owes as much to him hitting the pads as beating or taking the outside edge.
Yet even this aspect seems to have tailed off, with batsmen now making sure they keep their pads out of the way.
In the end, it must simply come down to nous. He has supreme confidence in his ability, is unflappable under fire (an interesting contrast to how Lyon reacted when first Pietersen and then Bell got stuck into him in a calculated manner in England's first innings at Old Trafford), can pick holes in a batsman's technique, and varies his pace and trajectory according to conditions and circumstance. There is a tantalising line that he bowls to right-handers too. England offspinners of yore, helped by a lack of fielding restrictions on the leg-side, tended to bowl a straighter line than their overseas counterparts but Swann operates outside the off-stump, inviting the drive through that side. No off-spinner likes being hit through extra cover off the front foot but none mind seeing a batsman try.
Perhaps Swann does have a little magic to him. When, from round the wicket, he proceeded to bowl the left-hander Usman Khawaja behind his legs with an off-break that turned significantly, he celebrated with the sort of joy that only comes when something is pre-planned, or at least signalled beforehand as an act of bravado.
It looked for all the world as if he meant it: he probably did.