You probably haven't heard much of Maurice Holmes, a little magician who turns the ball both ways. But Ricky Ponting has. Ponting first came across him in the indoor nets at Kent. And, like every other batsman facing Holmes for the first time, he had a little trouble telling the wrong'un from the right'un. "I've never seen anything like that," Ponting said after they were done. The second time they met was in Sydney, when Holmes was playing grade cricket for St George. "Oh," Ponting said when he saw Holmes standing at the far end of the nets. "Not you again."

Like a lot of us, Holmes first learned to play cricket with his brothers in the back garden. The difference between Maurice and you, me, and pretty much everyone else, was that he was a natural. He blessed with a talent that can't be taught, not for batting, or bowling fast, but for the most mercurial and elusive of skills – spinning the ball. And not just any old how. He was born with wrists that can bend in all sorts of different directions, and his shoulder blades, he has been told, are "physiologically in the wrong place". He started bowling off breaks with a cocked elbow and a curled wrist. Back then he couldn't have told you what he was doing, or how he did it, but Maurice had learned to bowl the doosra.

"It felt the most natural way to bowl," Holmes says. "Using my wrist rather than my fingers, I didn't know anything much about what I was doing. As far as I knew there was a bloke in every village bowling like that."

When he was 16, Holmes, who had never even played in a match of any sort, went along to his first net session at Tonbridge School. There, he caught the eye of coach Paul Parker, who had played a single Test for England in 1981. Parker put Holmes straight into Tonbridge's 'A' team, and a few weeks after that, the first XI. In the winter of 2008-09, at the indoor nets in Kent, Holmes bowled at Rob Key, who, as Maurice remembers it, was one of a bunch of batsmen who "danced past a doosra". Kent asked him to join their academy that same day.

The World Twenty20 was in England the following summer, and Holmes had heard that their were opportunities for net bowlers up at the Oval. Soon he was bowling to New Zealand's batsmen. "He rocked up," remembered coach Andy Moles, "and the boys said 'Bloody hell, this is just like facing Murali.'"

New Zealand were so impressed that they took him up to Trent Bridge to help them prepare for their match against Sri Lanka in the Super Eights. A couple of months later Moles asked Holmes if he wanted to travel with the Test team to Sri Lanka to work as a net bowler, a chance he leapt at. Daniel Vettori was particularly impressed with the kid, and he and a couple of other senior players had asked the coaching staff to invite Holmes along. He spent that tour working with Saqlain Mushtaq, who had been hired as a specialist coach, honing his bowling in the nets.

Back home in the early autumn, Holmes had some net sessions with England. Jon Trott and Ian Bell were so impressed by his bowling that they told Ashley Giles to invite him for a trial at Warwickshire. "So I spent an hour or two bowling at them in the nets. And at the end of it I was offered a contract on the spot. That," he says, with a little understatement, "was the end of a pretty amazing season."

Like Parker, Moles, Key, and Vettori, Giles reckoned that in Holmes he had discovered an unpolished gem of a player. So, the question is, why haven't you heard more of Maurice Holmes, the English mystery spinner? The answer, sadly, is that despite his obvious talent, he has been hounded out of first-class cricket. Holmes spent this last season playing for Sevenoaks Vine CC in the Kent League; meanwhile he is studying for a law degree in Birmingham. He hasn't given up on cricket, yet, but he is beginning to feel as though the game has given up on him.

"There has always been talk about my action," Holmes says. "It has followed me around, questions about whether it is legal, and how different it is." After that trial at Warwickshire in 2009 he went for his first biomechanical test at Loughborough. He failed it, and the contract offer was withdrawn. Undeterred, he decided to enrol at Loughborough University, reckoning it would be the best place to work on his action. "Every morning, six days a week, I was bowling in the nets for two hours, while everyone else was recovering from their hangovers." He worked with Saqlain, and with the ECB spin coach Peter Such, and between them they ironed out the kinks in his action.

Early in 2010 he got himself tested again, and passed. So Giles got back in touch and asked him to come and play for Warwickshire's second XI. He did so well that the club offered him a contract for 2011. He made his first team debut at the start of 2011, against Durham MCCU, and took a wicket with his very first ball. And then, soon after, he was reported again.

Holmes failed his next test in Loughborough, not because the bend in his arm exceeded the 15 degree limit – it didn't – but because the analysts decided that his bowling was "not match representative". They were comparing his action with footage taken eight weeks before, and he had changed the way he gathered himself as he entered his bowling stride. The England and Wales Cricket Board made little attempt to examine the nuances of his case. They simply put out a press release announcing that he had been suspended from county cricket.

The Professional Cricketers Association and the Warwickshire coach Dougie Brown stood by Holmes. They petitioned the ECB on his behalf, got him another test, and split the cost of it between them. This time, his off break was passed. But his doosra wasn't. Again, it wasn't because his arm was bending more than 15 degrees – it wasn't – but because the analysts decided that he was bowling it too slowly. They had clocked his fastest ball in a match, and wanted him to reproduce that speed with a doosra in the laboratory. He couldn't.

So Maurice was "warned" against using the doosra in a match. He was actually told that the delivery was still legal, but that the authorities would be "watching him very closely" if he used it in a match. Again, this nuance got lost along the way.

Since then, Maurice, still only 22, has pretty much been out on his own. He paid his way to go to the Global Cricket Academy in India, and has had a trial with Somerset and some interest from one or two other clubs, but his career has gone cold. Word has gone around the circuit that Holmes is a chucker, and the ECB have made no effort to correct or clarify the situation. A man with the rarest and most precious of talents has been frozen out of the game.

Sometimes, it can be all too easy to criticise the ECB. But in this case the governing body has done an extremely poor job of nurturing a good young player, and their uneasiness about the situation was evident in the perfunctory, dismissive manner in which they respondd to enquiries about it. The Spin contacted Dr Mark King, the specialist who conducts the biomechanical tests at Loughborough, to try to clarify Holmes's situation. He referred us back to the ECB, who then provided a routine statement referring back to the rules and regulations. King has been subject to a little scrutiny recently. George Dobell, of Cricinfo, wrote an excellent piece on the testing being done at Loughborough, explaining that the ICC do not currently recognise the results of tests conducted by the ECB.

In the meantime, the career of an exceptionally talented cricketer has been completely derailed. Holmes worries that the ECB have been "duplicitous" by suggesting that he has been banned from using the doosra, when in fact he has only been warned about it. And of course, there has been no public explanation that when he bowls his doosra, and his off break, his arm is within the 15 degree limit stipulated by the ICC. "I just think there has been a huge amount of misunderstanding," he says. "Umpires don't understand my situation, and don't know it."

If the ECB were serious about encouraging the development of doosra bowlers and other unorthodox spinners, they would surely have found a more sympathetic way to deal with Holmes that would have kept him in the game, and, at the very least, helped him fix any problems he has. But they haven't.

In Australia national selector John Inverarity has said the decision about whether or not the doosra should be taught to young bowlers is "a question of integrity", because he is not sure it can be bowled legally. Many people in England, it seems, would agree with him, though they haven't come out and said it. Holmes is not one of them. "It is proven that you can bowl the doosra within the limits; that is a scientific fact, there is no morality about it. I have proven that I can bowl it within the limits." It feels as though a confederacy of conservatives is at work against him.

"There will always be the English view, that something different is not necessarily something good," Holmes says. "There are people who tend to take the traditional view that things can and should only be done in one way."

Maurice Holmes may not have gone on to be a great bowler. His is the hardest of arts to master. But right now he has not even had the chance to try, and it is not for any lack of effort or willingness on his part. The authorities have failed him. "I would love to be bowling for a county and showing them what I can do," he says. "I would love to be and representing the English game because as far as I know there is no one else out there who can bowl the doosra." And if his experience is anything to judge by, there never will be.

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