Sussexshark said:
Oh dear oh dear! It is a universally held wisdom that the great bowlers would be great bowlers no matter era they played in; the same goes for the batsmen, although I do wonder how well some of today's batters would have coped on a true sticky, which is why I would always have Sir Jack Hobbs as one of the openers. Laker was a great bowler, I don't give a fig what any of the rest of you might say. So OK, Richard has a point in that there was a change in the 70s (or maybe earlier) from leaving wickets uncovered to covering them at the slightest hint that the skies might just spit on them, but that does not invalidate the performances of the likes of Laker, Verity, Freeman, Lock (when he wasn't chucking), Fleetwood-Smith, O'Reilly, Benaud and countless others.
It certainly doesn't invalidate the performances of O'Reilly, Benaud and Grimmett (how you could discount him I don't know) but I'm afraid it just cannot be coincidence that no non-subcontinental fingerspinner has been an especially good bowler - never mind a great one - since the days of Underwood in the '60s.
Freeman, Rhodes, Verity, Lock, Laker, etc. (don't really know why you put in Chuck Fleetwood-Smith - he of 10 Test-matches and an average of 37.38) were great bowlers in their era, but that era has gone now - fingerspinners can no longer be great bowlers (unless they are picked only on turning pitches - impossible, since you can't know for certain beforehand whether or not a pitch is going to turn appreciably). All the best spinners of the modern era (Qadir, Mushtaq Ahmed, Kumble, Murali, Warne) are wristspinners - as wristspin acquires a new dimension. All these are accurate to a degree previously left for dreams - and for Grimmett, O'Reilly and Benaud. Only in exceptional hands has wristspin ever been a true threat. Fingerspin, meanwhile, has had it's time - unless we do indeed go back to uncovered wickets, it'll never again be so.
As to the argument that Ashley Giles would have been as good as Laker if Ash had bowled in Laker's time, well I have to have serious doubts. I'm not anti-Giles (well, I was, but his performances this summer surprised many doubters), it's just that I don't think his style would have brought any more success then than it has up to now in this era.
His performances in the middle 3 Tests (that's all it was) didn't surprise me in the slightest - the pitches were turners, and he's almost always done well on turners. Had he played in an era where turners were far, far more common, I think it makes sense to guess that he'd have done rather better than he has in the days when they occur once in a blue moon - and in the subcontinent mostly.
