Uphill All the Way, Giles Pushes the Wheelie Bin to Its Potential

"What's the point of Ashley Giles?" griped a contributor to a cricket website last week. Well, quite a lot actually. His best bowling return in Tests in England and two spirited lower-order knocks at vital times made Trent Bridge his most satisfying Test match.

How Giles has yearned for such a convincing response. Being a spin bowler in England can be a thankless task and there have been times in the past year when he has been so sensitive to denunciations from public and media alike that he has contemplated retirement.

He has even had a lengthy session with England's psychologist Steve Bull, to learn how to withstand this sense of unpopularity. The country yearns impatiently, as it has been taught to yearn by the former captain Nasser Hussain, for a "mystery spinner" in the style of Murali or Shane Warne to bamboozle all that cross his path.

"I keep getting knocked, whether by the media or the crowd," Giles said yesterday. "The support of my family and team has been fantastic. If it wasn't for them maybe I would have said, 'OK, let someone else do it.' You can only take so much before it hurts.

"Stick hurts when it comes from your own supporters. I'm trying to bowl and people are shouting 'Get him off'. I've tried to understand it. Most have had too much to drink and probably live quite ordi nary lives. They just have to stir you. I mustn't let it affect me.

"I have felt under pressure for close on a year. I had a break in Sri Lanka when things were rosy and conditions were in my favour but apart from that it's been tough."

Slow bowling, Ashley Giles style, will never be glamorous. He is best equipped not to spin sides to destruction but to exert control gradually over long, persistent spells on unresponsive pitches. He dislikes the image of the wheelie bin, but that is how it seems: a bulky figure trundling in for a necessary, menial job.

He ranks Trent Bridge, where he took his best figures in England, four for 46, in New Zealand's second innings, as "definitely my most satisfying match". Add his successful holding operation at Lord's, when Marcus Trescothick controversially chose not to take the new ball, and he has had the most solid of summers.

In Nottingham his batting also prospered in an alliance with Graham Thorpe that led England to victory. He crashed boundaries square on the off side in the manner long familiar at Warwickshire.

"It's important that I'm seen as a package," he said. "I am not always going to bowl people out on wickets in England but scoring runs down the order is an area in which I can improve.

"I have batted with Thorpey before. You can always tell from how someone looks at you as you walk to the wicket whether they have confidence in you. If people have a look of panic then you might have been struggling."

It was good to see him recover the sense of fun to accept an after-match challenge to race 100m against Mark Richardson - officially New Zealand's slowest against England's slowest or, as he volunteered: "More the slowest available, the one who was willing to do it." Richardson appeared in a brown and beige running suit, but to no avail. "Mark dived for the line but I won by a head," he said. "I've a very big head."

Michael Atherton, the former England captain, has called for spin bowlers to be legally allowed a spot of arm-straightening, to impart more spin on flat pitches. It interests Giles but, at 31, he knows that if the poor old English spinner is to have a renaissance, someone else will benefit.

"That is not really an issue for me. Something needs to be done but I'm not sure that being allowed to straighten the arm is the answer. I'll be really upset to be replaced one day by guys who are throwing it."