It’s important, when you’re doing something resembling day by day commentary on a Test match, to get your blog piece finished before the day’s play. Developments after play has resumed tend to render some of what you’ve written irrelevant, and you're left fiddling around and adjusting things to meet the changes in the match situation.
I’d spent a good hour and a bit on Saturday morning on a piece provisionally titled It’s Not Rocket Surgery, largely based around the question of what we were doing inserting England after winning the toss on a wicket that didn’t seem to be offering the usual reasons for doing so.
Around eight-ten I wandered out of the air-conditioned office, planning a shower, breakfast, and a wrap up of the piece before play resumed at nine-thirty.
I emerged to find The Supervisor engaged in gardening activities with a list of accumulated tasks that required my immediate attention. It was lucky I emerged when I did because otherwise I’d probably have been late for the resumption.
Day Two in Melbourne had delivered a fair bit to think about, and it was hard to see how we were going to get ourselves out of a substantial hole, and harder to think of ways we could afford a fairly crushing defeat, and you’d have to put most of the blame, up to that point in time, on the decision to insert the opposition.
Pondering those matters as I lay in bed that morning I kept coming back to that very useful and much-encompassing phrase It’s not rocket surgery.
I might have picked that up from Kerry O’Keefe, who announced his impending retirement as Australia moved inexorably towards nine-for, but that combination of rocket science, with its accompanying notions of physics, gravity and aerodynamics and the attention to fiddly detail that would have to be a key ingredient in successful brain surgery epitomises something about matters of cricket strategy.
It is, when you get down to tin tacks, a very simple game. Someone bowls, attempting to hit the wicket. Someone defends the wicket and attempts to score some runs along the way.
And long-held adages are long held because they tend, year after year, season after season, to work.
Take the notion that you win the toss and bat. Filter it through the wisdom of the well-known English master of gamesmanship W.G. Grace, which went something like this:
If you win the toss, bat.
If you have reservations, give them some consideration, and bat.
If you have serious concerns, discuss them with a colleague, and bat.
I spent a bit of time after Day One pondering why we won the toss and sent England in, and after a salutary lesson yesterday, spent some time overnight pondering what I could only see as a tendency to get too smart too soon.
That might seem like taking some credit off an English attack that managed to get things pretty right, but you can only play as well as you’re allowed to and the insertion, to a large extent, helped to set things up for them.
I’m not suggesting there aren’t situations where you won’t be inclined to send the opposition in after you’ve won the toss, but they generally don’t line up well against the reasons why you tend to choose to bat.
Let’s look at those for a moment.
First, in any game, batting first ends up reading we’ve got ‘em, they’ve got to get ‘em. Knowing the target, or the score, you’re defending gives you some room to manoeuvre with your tactics and general approach.
Second, and this particularly applies to a two innings game played over two-hour sessions, batting first means you’re probably guaranteed a full two hour session and a single start to the innings. Sure, it might rain, but unless it does, your openers are only going to start once.
From there, unless the final wicket falls immediately beside a break, the team batting second, third and fourth are likely to have to get themselves through two spells with the new ball. Yesterday illustrated that point perfectly.
England might have been bundled out fairly briskly, but they used up enough time to leave thirteen overs until the Lunch break, collecting Warner and Watson along the way. They got Clarke to the crease early, and had two goes at him, eventually claiming him fairly cheaply. We’d struggled to nine-for and the prospect of a substantial deficit leading into England’s second innings.
Which brings us to the third reason for batting first, namely, if you bat first that probably means they bat last, possibly on a deck where batting would be starting to present difficulties. By that point, if it’s going to take turn it should have something for the spinners. If not, it’ll probably be increasingly slow and low which tends to make batting rather difficult.
That doesn’t mean you’re never going to bowl first, but by doing so you’re forfeiting certain other advantages. That first day Melbourne deck definitely seemed to lack justification for insertion.
What we got on Day Three, from where I was sitting, right up to the lunch break, didn’t do much to change perceptions. Haddin and Lyon stuck around, scored at a reasonably brisk clip, and got us within reach of the England first innings total.
Good. Tick. But still not where we wanted to be.
With a bit over an hour to bat until Lunch, England progressed to 0-54 with Cook looking pretty good while Carberry did a Tavare impersonation. We got a slight turnaround in that middle session, with Cook going first, Carberry following not long afterwards, followed by the unfortunately-named Root and Bell in quick succession.
it’s possible something like the two brain farts that produced these two dismissals formed part of the decision to insert on Day One, but I’m inclined to dismiss that suspicion. Root seemed to forget that Johnson is a left armer, hit the ball to hit left and ran. Possibly England rate Mitchell’s fielding on a par with their perception of his bowling, but a direct hit did the business.
Bell then proceeded to hit his first ball straight down Johnson’s throat, presenting Lyon with the first of his five-for.
That made things look better, but with Pietersen at the crease with Stokes and Bairstow, Bresnan and Broad to follow before the tail emerged, at 4-87 you’d still reckon they’d be looking good for around 220, which with the fifty run first innings lead would make for a tricky run chase.
Stokes went at 5-131 and Bairstow at 6-173, buy even at that point you’d have been rating 220 as a reasonable par score. Counting Bairstow, they then proceed to lose 5 for 6. Remarkable.
Even more remarkable was the Lyon analysis. 5-50 off 17 thank you very much.
Of course, he was helped by having Johnson at the other end, and the speed of the England demise gave us a neat little eight over spell to reduce the target from 231 to 201 in circumstances that might have been tricky if the England bowlers weren’t (and I’m assuming this to be the case) rather shocked by the fact that they were out in the paddock again.
In any case, what could have been a rather tricky session added thirty, reduced the target and failed to bring the limping Watson to the crease.
And from there, Day Four unfolded pretty well according to the script. A century to Rogers after Warner went at the end of the 17th over, a gritty 83 to Watson, who looked committed to delivering the goods and a red ink 6 to Clarke and we were home and hosed at 4-zip in the five Test series.
So, Hughesy, surely that takes care of those concerns of yours?
Actually, it doesn’t. The decision to insert suggested we were heading off into what has been a tricky area for Australia when we start looking to toy with the opposition’s mental processes. We’re at our best when we keep it very simple and snarl and gouge our way through the opposition.
I took myself through the lap around town this morning pondering these matters further, and came to the conclusion that this whole turn around from the English half of the dual series has come down to the bowling quartet, and the fact that they’ve restricted England to a modest total every time they’ve batted, and sparked a few spectacular collapses along the way.
Looking forwards, you’d have to fancy our chances in South Africa and beyond, but only as far as this particular bowling quartet (with Watson hovering on the periphery) are in action. Remove one element, and things are going to be substantially different.
The key here is Johnson and the important issue as far as he is concerned is the fear factor. A while back there were suggestions he would drop his pace back and bowl line and length the way his mentor and chief sponsor Dennis Lillee did in the later part of his career.
Don’t even think of it. He’s there to scare, particularly if the opposition aren’t inclined to rate him. End of story.
And when he goes, whatever the reason for his departure, he needs to be replaced by someone who has genuine pace and aggression. Not by someone who bowls dry. We’ve already got two blokes who do that. We don’t need a third. Go in with three dries and a spinner and the spinner might get among the wickets as the opposition look for runs where they can get them. They’re equally likely to sit back and wait until the quicks tire and then take their toll on a flagging attack.
That’s not rocket surgery either.
The beauty of this Australian attack is the balance. Two workhorses, one wild card and a spinner who learned his trade bowling in circumstances where everybody down to Eleven is inclined to Slap, particularly when the bowler is a slightly-built bloke bowling finger spin.
Harris and Siddle will keep trundling in and bowl their guts out for you. They’ll take wickets and keep things tight, Johnson has the left armer angle, and genuine pace, Lyon does what he does and if Watson bowls you’ve got a fourth medium pacer with The Genuine Quickie Mentality.
It’s handy. It’s working at the moment. Don’t tinker with it too much, and if you must tinker, don’t mess with the basics.
Watson and Harris must have question marks over the fitness going into Sydney. Possibly you rest one or both of them.
If it’s Watson, replace him with Faulkner and bat Clarke at Three. Give Faulkner a decent workout with the ball and hope to get Harris through relatively unscathed.
Rest Harris and it’s a different matter. The first question then becomes whether Watto is there and whether he’s going to bowl. He probably isn’t, so you're going to be looking for a workhorse. Coulter-Nile? Bollinger? Cutting?
Cricinfo will be providing some very interesting reading over the next day or two…
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