The bigger question of how well England go in the Ashes this summer might end up hinging on another, smaller and more specific question. And ultimately, resolving that smaller conundrum will become key to England's longer-term future.
The question is a simple one: A year on from his debut and breakthrough, what is Moeen Ali?
Is he a front-line batsman who is a handy spinning option, which is what his original configuration in the England team was? Or is he a frontline spinner who is a handy batting option at eight, as is the case after a reconfiguration as sudden as it was surprising?
Graeme Swann, who is an inescapable point of reference in the Moeen question, has an interesting take on Moeen’s emergence as a spinner – which has caused the confusion.
Speaking last month, he said: “Mo has bags of ability, he just doesn’t have the 10 years of spin-bowling nous and experience he would have had had he been a spin bowler rather than a batsman who used to be thrown the ball a bit.
“In a weird way that has put him ahead of the pack as he has avoided the coaching system that teaches spinners not to spin it in this country.”
In this framing, Moeen is actually a spinner who has long been trapped inside a batsman’s body. The system has not worked him out, though by failing, it has actually allowed him to become a better spinner.
His fade as a spinner since the India series last summer, Swann said, is down almost entirely to Moeen not getting enough encouragement after that performance. Too many people around him told him it will get tougher the following year – which it has – and not enough that he needs to just carry on as he was.
In that assessment, England’s own confusion is evident. In the series against New Zealand earlier this summer, Alastair Cook’s often sparing use of Moeen’s spin captured this.
It was as if Cook and England knew that Moeen needed to be in the team but were not sure what to do with him in it. In hindsight, the neither-here-nor-there nature of his performances should have been obvious.
His batting, at eight, was never afforded the platform for full expression that it needs. He made one fifty in the series. As a bowler, he did not bowl enough overs; in one innings, Cook waited until New Zealand were 125-0 before Moeen came on. And got the first wicket.
But the confusion is also understandable. When he does well with the bat, he does so with such a terrific lightness the allure is irresistible. It is precisely the kind of batting you do not often see in an English batting order, the kind they could do more with.
At the same time England need someone to replace Swann, so when Moeen does well with the ball, naturally he feels like he is the solution.
Batting, as he has at eight, where Swann used to bat fairly regularly, merely stretches the shadow of Swann under which Moeen plays. But he is too good to be batting that low and not yet anywhere near the bowler Swann was.
In hedging and deploying him essentially as an all-rounder, it still looks as if England simultaneously run the risk of losing the full benefits of one of his skills. As more and more attention has come to his bowling, it looks as if it has come at the cost of the kind of batting that almost saved the Headingley Test against Sri Lanka last summer.
In the long run, of course, he may end up as a true, if rare, spinning all-rounder. Just at this moment it does not look a foregone conclusion.
Not, in any case, if you go by what is the admittedly old and rigid test of a true all-rounder: that is, one of the skills should be good enough to warrant automatic selection. Is that truly the case right now with Moeen?
It could be. But if it is, which skill is it?
osamiuddin@thenational.ae
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