NASSER HUSSAIN: Slick Shoaib Bashir is showing he has nous with quality bowling despite only sending down seven overs on day two of second Test against Sri Lanka

Shoaib Bashir bowled only seven overs on Friday but I was very impressed with the quality of his bowling.

People will say he was bowling at Sri Lanka’s tail, but he wasn’t. He was bowling at Kamindu Mendis, a player who grew up playing against a lot of spin and a multi-hundred in Test cricket in Bangladesh.

Bashir, 20, has been picked to try and emulate world-class Australian off-spinner Nathan Lyon for next year’s Ashes and this was the most drop I’ve seen him get on the ball in his short career. It shows he’s a fast learner.

He was given that drop because he was producing so much spin and that meant that even a regular batsman like Mendis struggled to reach him.

Mendis tried to catch the ball in the beginning and a few times he played in defense and the ball hit the splice of his bat. That is exactly what Lyon does to opponents.

Bashir was bowling to Kamindu Mendis, a player who grew up playing against a lot of spin

When he put Prabath Jayasuriya on strike, he followed up with three throws at 85-87 kilometres per hour, saved one and flew beautifully.

Jayasuriya came running and thought he had reached the pitch of the ball, but he was half a yard short. The ball turned and went through the gate.

The problem with the England squad these days is that they don’t select players based on statistics anymore.

Just look at Leicestershire’s Josh Hull, who was called up to this Test team with a County Championship bowling average of 182.5 to prove it.

It’s a huge change from my days when it was all about who got the most wickets and scored the most runs, they were automatically the next cabs up the pecking order.

Now cricketers are being selected to provide England with what they lack and what they take from their spinners – think Jack Leach and Mooen Ali in the recent Ashes – was one of those things.

The 20-year-old set Prabath Jayasuriya to work and he followed up with three deliveries at 53-54

It’s early days and he still needs to work on his line control to the right-handers, but there are good signs that Bashir will be tough to reach in Australia next year.

England also played well as a collective; it looked like they had played a lot of cricket at Lord’s.

When Middlesex’s Steven Finn joined the team 15 years ago, he talked a lot about the slope and the positions required for the pitch’s famous slope: a leg slip or a leg gully.

Stuart Broad and Jimmy Anderson developed that further and now the next generation of bowlers still benefit from that subtle local knowledge when bowling to a right-handed bowler from the pavilion side.

Sometimes batters just throw the ball to that area and that’s exactly where Ollie Pope sets up his trap.

England played well as a collective and looked like a team that has played a lot of cricket at Lord’s.

Then Matthew Potts successfully challenged the outside edge from the nursery side for two dismissals in one over.

Sri Lanka looked like a team that had not played much cricket before, based on their good performance on the first day, but England and Bashir showed they knew what they were doing.