From time to time you run across something that you can’t let pass without comment, and this time it’s the downright risible suggestion put by former England Rugby coach Sir Clive Woodward in The Daily Mail in an article wonderfully titled The power must be with Flower, not Downton, the selectors or anyone else.
You might remember Sir Clive. He was the coaching genius who won a Rugby World Cup thanks to the golden boot of Jonny Wilkinson and a game plan that seemed to be based around using the rest of the team to generate the opportunities for Jonny to exercise it.
From what I could see that meant using the forward pack to gain penalties in the scrum and at the breakdown and leaving Jonny to do the rest. But I digress…
Actually, Woodward does get one thing right when he says the 5-0 scoreline serves as a sharp reminder of how quickly things can unravel at the highest level of elite sport.
He then goes on to pooh-pooh the role of selection committees and, believe it or not, the captain of the side in picking the team and suggest that selection be left to Flower.
Actually, I hope they do. It’d probably put English cricket back a good ten years while they come to the conclusion that Flower was the wrong man for the job, and then appoint another technocrat to the same head honcho el supremo position.
Woodward, of course, comes from a background where the notion might work, and cites Rugby and Soccer as sports where an all-powerful coach or manager is the way to go.
In those sports, and in Rugby League, that might work. Select a side to go to a World Cup in any of the three codes, or to undertake an old style international tour with a number of tour games interspersed with the Test matches, and you’ll pick a group of thirty to thirty-six players.
That figure more or less equates to a team (your first XI, XIII or XV), a full team of reserves and a bench full of spare players. Take an England Rugby side on a tour of Australia with a couple of Tests, and games against every state and a couple of country teams and you probably need around three dozen players on tour.
And in that environment your coaching supremo can watch what’s going on and select his team. He’s got everyone in one place, and he’s got the State and upcountry games as well as the training paddock to sort out his Test side, with at least two candidates for every spot.
Cricket doesn’t quite work like that.
Even on an old-style Ashes tour, England or Australia only sent a squad of around seventeen players. That was your likely Test side, plus a reserve keeper and a spin bowler, two spare bats and two spare quicks.
In the bullet points at the top of the article, Woodward delivers these three zingers:
• Andy Flower must be allowed to make the key decisions
• At the moment, too many decisions are being made by committee
• Alastair Cook should ignore advice to talk to ex-captains and be himself
And, just for the sake of throwing in a voice from within the England camp, let’s cite Matt Prior: England lacked respect for Alastair Cook and Andy Flower (), where he takes aim at a lack of professionalism by England's players and a loss of respect for their captain and coach.
Read down that article, and you find Prior talking about the importance of a professional attitude and Little things like wearing the right kit, turning up to meetings on time, not five minutes late.
Or, Hughesy suggests without any hint of a tongue in cheek, not handing in your homework.
According to Woodward, too many decisions are being made by committee, but when it comes to cricket selections it’s hard to see how you avoid that.
Cricket coaches at the top level aren’t given large squads to work with. Nor are they ever likely to be.
And unless you’ve got all your top level talent assembled in what amounts to an ongoing training camp I don’t see how you can get away from a selection committee because, in the Australian context, we’ve tended to have a member of the selection panel at every important game.
With every Sheffield Shield game as an important game and the possibility that you’ll have three of them running at the same time as a Test match you’ll want to have four blokes watching…
In England, on the other hand, where you’ve got around eighteen county sides, you mightn’t be able to have someone watching every game, but you’d have trusted observers who you’d trust to deliver an accurate assessment.
How does the Test coach, who is supervising the preparation of his squad, going to get around and assess the credentials of the up and coming players out there? He can’t do that all by himself.
Or maybe he can, using trusted confidants who don’t have official status.
And as for suggestions that Cook should ignore advice to talk to blokes who’ve done his job before, that’s downright laughable.
Cook probably wasn’t the former England Under-19 Stuart Law was referring to when he talked about the bloke who didn’t need to talk to an old-timer in the bar at the Essex County Ground. He did score 214 against the 2005 Australian side, but that was well after Law and Essex parted company.
The important point Law was making was that you can pick up a lot by talking to people who’ve been there and done that, and it’s best done over a jar or two in a free-ranging conversation. You dismiss some things as irrelevant, of course, but there’ll be stuff you’ll find interesting, some of which you’ll file away for future reference.
And former captains, who are used to making assessments of opposition players just might be able to offer the odd insight, even if it’s a half-formed notion along the lines of You know, I always suspected…
But the biggest joke about the Woodward article is the assumption that Flower is the right man for the job in the first place.
I suspect he isn’t, and I’d suggest that Prior’s comments indicate an England camp moving towards the sort of territory Australia found themselves in leading up to the homework affair.
In that sort of circumstance, the answer is not to give the current coaching supremo even more power…
Thursday, January 9, 2014
Tuesday, January 7, 2014
Out of the Ashes
Having stated I have scant interest in the England team and coaching setup, the following may seem a tad hypocritical, with more than a dash of gloating involved, but after the Homework Affair and the demise of Mickey Arthur I’m interested to see how these things pan out and want to keep something as a handy aide-memoir with accompanying hyperlinks to save me from having to go looking for vaguely-remembered snippets somewhere down the track.
Assuming, of course, they’re still there.
There has, of course, been the predictable flood of condemnation, in varying tones scattered across the spectrum from irate through scathing towards embarrassed, with lashings of it’d never have happened in my day from commentators safe in the knowledge that it didn’t.
This one, from The Guardian would appear to be a representative sample:
UK Ashes press round-up: England 'emasculated' by Australian juggernaut: Alastair Cook's side were humiliated over five brutal Tests, and British sport writers blamed poor batting and a rampant Mitchell Johnson .
Martin Crowe on the difference between the two sides here: Hard run-makers revive Australia.
Predictably, there’s the regulation adjustment and search for a share of the spotlight from one of the players with a big question mark over the intersection of place and role in the team (how much does he bowl and where does he bat?) in The Ashes: Shane Watson credits own stance with turnaround in team culture, but the headline’s slightly misleading. The key there is the change wrought with remarkable speed by Darren Lehmann.
There’s a similar piece here: Lehmann made playing for Australia fun again - Watson
There’s an intriguing version of events around the change of coach here: Australia's Ashes turning point.
If Watson’s right, and I’m not suggesting he isn’t, this brings additional pressure to bear on England coach Andy Flower, and it’s his future that has me intrigued. You get headlines like
Andy Flower to stay on as England coach but warns of more pain and Flower determined to correct mistakes although we also have Andy Flower may quit as England team director if Kevin Pietersen plays on, and on Cricinfo, Pietersen future under scrutiny, which contains a rather telling little suggestion from Michael Vaughan, a former England captain, that Pietersen should become vice-captain deliberately to break down a culture of "yes men" that has grown up around the England set-up.
That might, in turn, throw some light on this little gem I found on Cricinfo (England's road to hell), which may be fact, fiction or one of four flavours of a synthesis of the two I’ll refer to as faction.
It might be largely factual, leavened by a smidgen of fiction.
Alternatively, it could be fiction, built on a factual basis.
And there are two possible aspects of a house divided that could fuel either or both of the above, a leaking of detail that might not be entirely factual to an outsider, or a story designed to promote the dissident faction in a divided dressing room. Intriguing.
There’s a toeing the party line narrative from within the England camp at Pain can drive us to new heights while Back to the days of boom and bust: England's chief executive David Collier has guaranteed Andy Flower a job until 2015 - and the debrief on England's Ashes humiliation has not begun. Can that be right? published on the eve of the final massacre raises some serious issues that will need to be addressed if England are looking to reverse their fortunes.
And as the stories continue to emerge I'll continue to aggregate the content for future reference. Stay tunes.
Assuming, of course, they’re still there.
There has, of course, been the predictable flood of condemnation, in varying tones scattered across the spectrum from irate through scathing towards embarrassed, with lashings of it’d never have happened in my day from commentators safe in the knowledge that it didn’t.
This one, from The Guardian would appear to be a representative sample:
UK Ashes press round-up: England 'emasculated' by Australian juggernaut: Alastair Cook's side were humiliated over five brutal Tests, and British sport writers blamed poor batting and a rampant Mitchell Johnson .
Martin Crowe on the difference between the two sides here: Hard run-makers revive Australia.
Predictably, there’s the regulation adjustment and search for a share of the spotlight from one of the players with a big question mark over the intersection of place and role in the team (how much does he bowl and where does he bat?) in The Ashes: Shane Watson credits own stance with turnaround in team culture, but the headline’s slightly misleading. The key there is the change wrought with remarkable speed by Darren Lehmann.
There’s a similar piece here: Lehmann made playing for Australia fun again - Watson
There’s an intriguing version of events around the change of coach here: Australia's Ashes turning point.
If Watson’s right, and I’m not suggesting he isn’t, this brings additional pressure to bear on England coach Andy Flower, and it’s his future that has me intrigued. You get headlines like
Andy Flower to stay on as England coach but warns of more pain and Flower determined to correct mistakes although we also have Andy Flower may quit as England team director if Kevin Pietersen plays on, and on Cricinfo, Pietersen future under scrutiny, which contains a rather telling little suggestion from Michael Vaughan, a former England captain, that Pietersen should become vice-captain deliberately to break down a culture of "yes men" that has grown up around the England set-up.
That might, in turn, throw some light on this little gem I found on Cricinfo (England's road to hell), which may be fact, fiction or one of four flavours of a synthesis of the two I’ll refer to as faction.
It might be largely factual, leavened by a smidgen of fiction.
Alternatively, it could be fiction, built on a factual basis.
And there are two possible aspects of a house divided that could fuel either or both of the above, a leaking of detail that might not be entirely factual to an outsider, or a story designed to promote the dissident faction in a divided dressing room. Intriguing.
There’s a toeing the party line narrative from within the England camp at Pain can drive us to new heights while Back to the days of boom and bust: England's chief executive David Collier has guaranteed Andy Flower a job until 2015 - and the debrief on England's Ashes humiliation has not begun. Can that be right? published on the eve of the final massacre raises some serious issues that will need to be addressed if England are looking to reverse their fortunes.
And as the stories continue to emerge I'll continue to aggregate the content for future reference. Stay tunes.
Sunday, January 5, 2014
Let the Bloodletting Begin, I'll be Watching From Afar
There’ll be a few sore heads around the Australian Cricket camp this morning, and quite rightly so, but as those involved attack the Berocca and other vital sources of Vitamin B it's important that we don’t get carried away.
Five-nil is all very nice, but the prospect of South Africa looms on the horizon, and with just under a week until the start of the ODI series against the Old Enemy there’s a chance to inflict a bit more damage to an outfit that has to be getting very close to the ropes.
That’s a task that needs to be approached with caution, but needs to be approached.
There’s a chance to push a few more of their senior players over the edge into retirement, and the chance to inflict a few psychological scars on the up and comers. That last bit doesn’t need to be anything too fancy, just straightforward hard cricket, played without giving an inch.
Do that well enough and you might get them to the point where the old hands start thinking the kitchen’s getting a little too hot for their liking, the newcomers start doubting whether they can really cut it at this level and any internal ructions among the camp turn into outright hostility.
And, once it’s done, you might just be heading to South Africa with a sort of steely resolve to stare down the aggro that’ll be headed in your direction by an intimidating pace attack, a tong batting line up and highly partisan crowds.
England, of course, will be homeward bound around then, needing to sort out where they’re headed, and developments on that front will be worth watching.
One of the best things about delivering a serious trouncing is watching the aftermath because you need to be reminded what not to do when it’s your turn on the treadmill.
There’ll be an inquiry of some sort, and you can see the start of the navel-gazing in this article (Well-prepared England well beaten: Andy Flower has been the best coach England have had but the environment he created has led to 5-0). Interesting, and well worth a read.
It’s not that long ago that Australia was in the same boat, though the series that led to the inquiry was 3-1 rather than 5-0. That last Ashes series down under gave us the Argus Report, John Inverarity, Mickey Arthur, Mike Howard and Michael Clarke as captain and selector to replace Andrew Hilditch, Tim Neilsen, nobody and Ricky Ponting.
And with the replacements in place it took a while to shake things out and create a workable modus operandi.
Hopefully, when the England hierarchy starts the analysis the outcome will be equally muddled. That’ll make the urn easier to defend while we, hopefully, continue to Keep It Simple and Make It Fun.
That, I think, is the secret to recent success. We got the selection right, played it hard and made the team environment an enjoyable place to be.
Let’s pause and look at those matters a little more closely.
The first thing we got right, IMHO, was the appointment of a full time National Selector. Andrew Hilditch had been trying to run a law practice and select Australian teams, and you can’t do both.
The first thing we got wrong was the combination around the selection table. That’s not to say that there’s never a place for a captain on the selection panel, but Clarke wasn’t the right man to sit on that panel at that point in time.
The second thing we got wrong probably the interaction between those at the supervisory level once the team was selected, and between supervisors and the players once the selected team assembled.
It’s just over twelve months since we were agonising over a rotation policy that seemed to be the outcome of an inability to deliver a fast bowling attack that didn’t have someone breaking down. It seems no one had the common sense to sit down with the players, explain what was happening and why it was necessary and spell out that the formula wasn’t open to negotiation.
I may have it wrong, but if the logic involves a statistical probability of breaking down in the next match if you bowl more than x number of overs in this one you need to assure the players you’re not doing things that’ll push them into the at risk category and you also need to deliver a strong message about not commenting on, or being guarded in your comments about, selection matters.
That’s not to suggest there’s no room for someone doing Pat Howard’s job, managing international workloads and monitoring the interactions between state and national teams. There are a number of stakeholders involved, and you probably need someone to make sure that one crowd’s self-interest doesn’t undermine the greater good of everyone else.
There was a touch of that last point in the post-match radio discussion when the subject of Pat Cummins (Australia’s highest paid university student) came up. He’d just made a score in Perth club cricket, and there was some speculation he was about to be included in the Scorchers’ line up. The kid’s still in the at risk age group, coming back off serious injury, and needs to be brought back gradually rather than rushed into the limelight for short term advantage in a competition that may be irrelevant.
Cummins may be the genuinely quick quickie we’ll need when Johnson slows down. End of story. He’s on his way back, doing something constructive along the way, and if he’s also coming along as a batsman that’ll probably come in handy as well.
And, of course, the Argus Report gave us Mickey Arthur, which as it turns out wasn’t the smartest move.
That’s not saying it wasn’t a move that needed to be made, but it didn’t turn out right.
The big point here is that you need the right people at the top of things, and those people aren’t necessarily the ones with the best on paper credentials. They’re possibly not the ones with the perceived best track record either.
At this point, we’re hovering on the edge of familiar territory as we approach what The Actor and I refer to as the Potassium Counters.
I spent a fair bit of time hovering around the Primary School representative scene, and I’ve seen more than one or two Level Three Accredited Coaches I’d be reluctant to put in charge of an Under 11 team. Level Three supposedly qualifies you to coach an international side, but having the piece of paper doesn’t necessarily mean you can coach.
Conversely, the lack of the piece of paper doesn’t mean you can’t.
The Actor, with a grandson who had the right build to be a shot-putter, trained the kid to national age championships, and I was in the vicinity one Friday night when he collared a young bloke who knew a little about the shot and had a demonstration of some basic dos and don’ts in a quiet corner of the QB pub.
That was never going to be enough, and he went on to put himself through the process of gaining national accreditation to help the kid along the way, and ensure that someone else didn’t step in and stuff things up for him.
And, in the process, he ran across people whose perceived role was to monitor the athlete’s potassium intake, or some other seemingly insignificant matter. There’s a tendency for organisations like teams and national sporting bodies to set up extensive support structures, and there’s a large number of people with impressive paper qualifications looking for a job.
The employment of Potassium Counters and the need to give them something to do is more than likely, the origin of the Homework Affair, which marked the beginning of Mickey Arthur’s demise. He had been, of course, a rather successful coach at international level, but one could mount a pretty strong case to suggest the proverbial Blind Freddie could have coached the Proteas at that stage of things.
So I’ll be watching reports coming out of England as the navel-gazing begins, and while I’m waiting that article linked to earlier is well worth a careful read.
Not that I’m going to opine on the England process, you understand. There’s plenty to keep me busy worrying about where we’re headed…
Five-nil is all very nice, but the prospect of South Africa looms on the horizon, and with just under a week until the start of the ODI series against the Old Enemy there’s a chance to inflict a bit more damage to an outfit that has to be getting very close to the ropes.
That’s a task that needs to be approached with caution, but needs to be approached.
There’s a chance to push a few more of their senior players over the edge into retirement, and the chance to inflict a few psychological scars on the up and comers. That last bit doesn’t need to be anything too fancy, just straightforward hard cricket, played without giving an inch.
Do that well enough and you might get them to the point where the old hands start thinking the kitchen’s getting a little too hot for their liking, the newcomers start doubting whether they can really cut it at this level and any internal ructions among the camp turn into outright hostility.
And, once it’s done, you might just be heading to South Africa with a sort of steely resolve to stare down the aggro that’ll be headed in your direction by an intimidating pace attack, a tong batting line up and highly partisan crowds.
England, of course, will be homeward bound around then, needing to sort out where they’re headed, and developments on that front will be worth watching.
One of the best things about delivering a serious trouncing is watching the aftermath because you need to be reminded what not to do when it’s your turn on the treadmill.
There’ll be an inquiry of some sort, and you can see the start of the navel-gazing in this article (Well-prepared England well beaten: Andy Flower has been the best coach England have had but the environment he created has led to 5-0). Interesting, and well worth a read.
It’s not that long ago that Australia was in the same boat, though the series that led to the inquiry was 3-1 rather than 5-0. That last Ashes series down under gave us the Argus Report, John Inverarity, Mickey Arthur, Mike Howard and Michael Clarke as captain and selector to replace Andrew Hilditch, Tim Neilsen, nobody and Ricky Ponting.
And with the replacements in place it took a while to shake things out and create a workable modus operandi.
Hopefully, when the England hierarchy starts the analysis the outcome will be equally muddled. That’ll make the urn easier to defend while we, hopefully, continue to Keep It Simple and Make It Fun.
That, I think, is the secret to recent success. We got the selection right, played it hard and made the team environment an enjoyable place to be.
Let’s pause and look at those matters a little more closely.
The first thing we got right, IMHO, was the appointment of a full time National Selector. Andrew Hilditch had been trying to run a law practice and select Australian teams, and you can’t do both.
The first thing we got wrong was the combination around the selection table. That’s not to say that there’s never a place for a captain on the selection panel, but Clarke wasn’t the right man to sit on that panel at that point in time.
The second thing we got wrong probably the interaction between those at the supervisory level once the team was selected, and between supervisors and the players once the selected team assembled.
It’s just over twelve months since we were agonising over a rotation policy that seemed to be the outcome of an inability to deliver a fast bowling attack that didn’t have someone breaking down. It seems no one had the common sense to sit down with the players, explain what was happening and why it was necessary and spell out that the formula wasn’t open to negotiation.
I may have it wrong, but if the logic involves a statistical probability of breaking down in the next match if you bowl more than x number of overs in this one you need to assure the players you’re not doing things that’ll push them into the at risk category and you also need to deliver a strong message about not commenting on, or being guarded in your comments about, selection matters.
That’s not to suggest there’s no room for someone doing Pat Howard’s job, managing international workloads and monitoring the interactions between state and national teams. There are a number of stakeholders involved, and you probably need someone to make sure that one crowd’s self-interest doesn’t undermine the greater good of everyone else.
There was a touch of that last point in the post-match radio discussion when the subject of Pat Cummins (Australia’s highest paid university student) came up. He’d just made a score in Perth club cricket, and there was some speculation he was about to be included in the Scorchers’ line up. The kid’s still in the at risk age group, coming back off serious injury, and needs to be brought back gradually rather than rushed into the limelight for short term advantage in a competition that may be irrelevant.
Cummins may be the genuinely quick quickie we’ll need when Johnson slows down. End of story. He’s on his way back, doing something constructive along the way, and if he’s also coming along as a batsman that’ll probably come in handy as well.
And, of course, the Argus Report gave us Mickey Arthur, which as it turns out wasn’t the smartest move.
That’s not saying it wasn’t a move that needed to be made, but it didn’t turn out right.
The big point here is that you need the right people at the top of things, and those people aren’t necessarily the ones with the best on paper credentials. They’re possibly not the ones with the perceived best track record either.
At this point, we’re hovering on the edge of familiar territory as we approach what The Actor and I refer to as the Potassium Counters.
I spent a fair bit of time hovering around the Primary School representative scene, and I’ve seen more than one or two Level Three Accredited Coaches I’d be reluctant to put in charge of an Under 11 team. Level Three supposedly qualifies you to coach an international side, but having the piece of paper doesn’t necessarily mean you can coach.
Conversely, the lack of the piece of paper doesn’t mean you can’t.
The Actor, with a grandson who had the right build to be a shot-putter, trained the kid to national age championships, and I was in the vicinity one Friday night when he collared a young bloke who knew a little about the shot and had a demonstration of some basic dos and don’ts in a quiet corner of the QB pub.
That was never going to be enough, and he went on to put himself through the process of gaining national accreditation to help the kid along the way, and ensure that someone else didn’t step in and stuff things up for him.
And, in the process, he ran across people whose perceived role was to monitor the athlete’s potassium intake, or some other seemingly insignificant matter. There’s a tendency for organisations like teams and national sporting bodies to set up extensive support structures, and there’s a large number of people with impressive paper qualifications looking for a job.
The employment of Potassium Counters and the need to give them something to do is more than likely, the origin of the Homework Affair, which marked the beginning of Mickey Arthur’s demise. He had been, of course, a rather successful coach at international level, but one could mount a pretty strong case to suggest the proverbial Blind Freddie could have coached the Proteas at that stage of things.
So I’ll be watching reports coming out of England as the navel-gazing begins, and while I’m waiting that article linked to earlier is well worth a careful read.
Not that I’m going to opine on the England process, you understand. There’s plenty to keep me busy worrying about where we’re headed…
Thursday, January 2, 2014
Looking Beyond the Possible Five-Nil...
Looking at the possibility of a five-nil whitewash there’ll undoubtedly be people sitting back and muttering things about wishing things were more competitive.
Which, of course, is balderdash, unless you’re an England supporter.
Five-nil is the score line that, in some cases, suggests that there probably aren’t too many things that could have been done much better. It means you’ve probably got most things right, but the important question involves where we go from here.
Taking our prompt from this article (Australia eye unforeseen clean sweep) there are a couple of points that need to be emphasised.
Brydon Coverdale (for mine, one of the best cricket writers going around) nails things pretty well towards the bottom of the piece when he offers the following Stats and trivia:
• Should Australia win in Sydney it will complete their third 5-0 Ashes clean sweep, after 1920-21 and 2006-07
From which, one would suggest that if the whitewash does fall into place, rather than wishing things were more competitive, you should enjoy it. It doesn’t happen very often.
• If Australia name an unchanged side it will be the first time they have ever used the same XI throughout a five-Test series
Which is interesting on two counts. First, it suggests that we’ve got our strongest side on the paddock, and have managed to keep it there without issues involving injury or loss of form. That’s remarkable in its own way, but also suggests we don’t have players on the fringe of
Test selection sticking their hands up. There are still question marks over much of the batting order, and there’s no one in the top six who looks to have cemented a place in the long term.
Warner and Rogers look like a reasonable opening combination, though Rogers isn’t going to be there next time England tours here. He may well be missing when we head across to defend the urn.
Watson remains a question mark at Three, and the question of whether, and how much, he bowls remains.
Clarke is only there until his back goes and isn’t going to be able to play every Test of every series in the meantime. That doesn’t mean he’s going anywhere soon, but every Test and every series could be his last.
Smith needs to become more consistent, and Bailey needs to translate limited over success into long form consistency, and probably needs to do it very quickly.
Haddin has is no more than a medium-term prospect with the gloves, and Wade has slipped down the pecking order.
This fast bowling trio is only going to last as long as it takes for one of them to break down.
Ironically, that means the best long-term prospect in this eleven is possibly Nathan Lyon, who is coming along very nicely.
• In the event of a draw or an Australian win, Australia will jump from fifth to third on the ICC Test rankings and England would drop from third to fourth. An England win would leave England third and Australia would move up from fifth to fourth
And this one, folks, is the one that matters.
Win this Test and we still have to overcome India and South Africa, and we’ll need to do it home and away. We’ve got a huge reality test coming up next month with three Tests in South Africa.
A glance at the Future Series/ Tournaments page on Cricinfo shows nothing on the Test front before the next Australian summer and World Cups in both short forms this year (T20) and next (ODI).
So, in some ways, we’ve got a bit of time to catch our breath and take a look around.
As far as the short forms go, we’ve got five ODIs, a PM’s XI game and three T20s against England before that T20 World Cup, and the rest of the Big Bash to keep us amused in the interim.
We should be looking to make the semi-finals in that T20 World Cup. After that everything is pretty much in the hands of the cricketing gods.
We should be competitive in the 50 over version as well, and should be looking to make the final there.
But the key issue, as it always will be, involves getting to #1 in the Test rankings and, once we have, staying there.
That means, for mine, getting to the point where we’ve got our strongest side on the park, with adequate cover for each position and allowances for differing playing conditions.
If there’s one lesson to be learned from the position England currently find themselves in, it’s the need to have a reasonably strong squad with adequate and reasonably experienced reserves.
Using this eleven as the basis for that squad, we want two backup openers, someone who could slot into Three or Four, someone for Five or six, cover for the ‘keeper, three backup quicks with a couple of roles covered between then, a reserve offie, a potential leggie (bearing in mind that it might be Smith) and a left arm tweaker other than Clarke.
Do a head count out of that lot and you’re looking at a group of around twenty, drawn from six Shield squads, which would number somewhere between twenty and thirty players. Say one hundred and twenty regular first class players, and that’s one in six playing, on the verge of playing, or with an outside chance of playing, for Australia.
One in six, or thereabouts.
So, if we’re looking to go on from here, hit the top of the rankings and stay there, we need to ensure that the Shield is the strongest competition we can organise. It has to be hard fought, and it needs to be played on surfaces that aren’t too far removed from Test cricket.
Shield cricket should have batsmen amassing substantial scores against bowlers who are looking to insert themselves in the pecking order when it comes to Australian selection. They need to be doing that on wickets that offer pace and bounce on Day One, flatten out on Days Two and Three and start to take turn on Day Four.
We should be taking a serious look at playing Shield games over five days.
Ironically, one thing that will make that possible is a continuation of this season’s major innovation, playing the interstate one-day series in a block in one capital city. It doesn’t always have to be Sydney, and it probably doesn’t actually need to be a capital city, but the notion of the interstate one-daters as a pre-season comp has definite merit and is worth persisting with.
It serves as a warm-up for the Shield, which runs nicely into the Test series, and since we’re going to be burdened with a Big Bash into the foreseeable future, at least it slots nicely in towards the limited overs side of the international calendar.
And, as far as the emerging players are concerned, we need the up and coming quicks to be working on their batting through that time when their bowling workloads are being strictly managed.
We need to have all batsmen working on being able to bowl something reasonably well. Doesn’t have to be particularly flash, just an ability to land something reasonable on a fairly consistent basis, hopefully with a variation thrown in.
Every player in every squad under the age of twenty-five should also be working towards gaining professional, academic or tradesman qualifications so that they have definite prospects for life after cricket. These things should be a conscious effort on the part of the various State bodies as a way on ensuring the talent isn’t being drawn away by the football codes, which can offer bigger money at an earlier stage in the athlete’s career.
And, whatever we do, when all that starts to sound a little bit too close to routine and mundane, and we’re tempted to do something fancy, we need to give ourselves a pinch, and adopt a constant mantra of Keep it simple, stupid.
Oh, and nothing resembling a thirty-eight page document outlining the dietary requirements, thank you very much.
Which, of course, is balderdash, unless you’re an England supporter.
Five-nil is the score line that, in some cases, suggests that there probably aren’t too many things that could have been done much better. It means you’ve probably got most things right, but the important question involves where we go from here.
Taking our prompt from this article (Australia eye unforeseen clean sweep) there are a couple of points that need to be emphasised.
Brydon Coverdale (for mine, one of the best cricket writers going around) nails things pretty well towards the bottom of the piece when he offers the following Stats and trivia:
• Should Australia win in Sydney it will complete their third 5-0 Ashes clean sweep, after 1920-21 and 2006-07
From which, one would suggest that if the whitewash does fall into place, rather than wishing things were more competitive, you should enjoy it. It doesn’t happen very often.
• If Australia name an unchanged side it will be the first time they have ever used the same XI throughout a five-Test series
Which is interesting on two counts. First, it suggests that we’ve got our strongest side on the paddock, and have managed to keep it there without issues involving injury or loss of form. That’s remarkable in its own way, but also suggests we don’t have players on the fringe of
Test selection sticking their hands up. There are still question marks over much of the batting order, and there’s no one in the top six who looks to have cemented a place in the long term.
Warner and Rogers look like a reasonable opening combination, though Rogers isn’t going to be there next time England tours here. He may well be missing when we head across to defend the urn.
Watson remains a question mark at Three, and the question of whether, and how much, he bowls remains.
Clarke is only there until his back goes and isn’t going to be able to play every Test of every series in the meantime. That doesn’t mean he’s going anywhere soon, but every Test and every series could be his last.
Smith needs to become more consistent, and Bailey needs to translate limited over success into long form consistency, and probably needs to do it very quickly.
Haddin has is no more than a medium-term prospect with the gloves, and Wade has slipped down the pecking order.
This fast bowling trio is only going to last as long as it takes for one of them to break down.
Ironically, that means the best long-term prospect in this eleven is possibly Nathan Lyon, who is coming along very nicely.
• In the event of a draw or an Australian win, Australia will jump from fifth to third on the ICC Test rankings and England would drop from third to fourth. An England win would leave England third and Australia would move up from fifth to fourth
And this one, folks, is the one that matters.
Win this Test and we still have to overcome India and South Africa, and we’ll need to do it home and away. We’ve got a huge reality test coming up next month with three Tests in South Africa.
A glance at the Future Series/ Tournaments page on Cricinfo shows nothing on the Test front before the next Australian summer and World Cups in both short forms this year (T20) and next (ODI).
So, in some ways, we’ve got a bit of time to catch our breath and take a look around.
As far as the short forms go, we’ve got five ODIs, a PM’s XI game and three T20s against England before that T20 World Cup, and the rest of the Big Bash to keep us amused in the interim.
We should be looking to make the semi-finals in that T20 World Cup. After that everything is pretty much in the hands of the cricketing gods.
We should be competitive in the 50 over version as well, and should be looking to make the final there.
But the key issue, as it always will be, involves getting to #1 in the Test rankings and, once we have, staying there.
That means, for mine, getting to the point where we’ve got our strongest side on the park, with adequate cover for each position and allowances for differing playing conditions.
If there’s one lesson to be learned from the position England currently find themselves in, it’s the need to have a reasonably strong squad with adequate and reasonably experienced reserves.
Using this eleven as the basis for that squad, we want two backup openers, someone who could slot into Three or Four, someone for Five or six, cover for the ‘keeper, three backup quicks with a couple of roles covered between then, a reserve offie, a potential leggie (bearing in mind that it might be Smith) and a left arm tweaker other than Clarke.
Do a head count out of that lot and you’re looking at a group of around twenty, drawn from six Shield squads, which would number somewhere between twenty and thirty players. Say one hundred and twenty regular first class players, and that’s one in six playing, on the verge of playing, or with an outside chance of playing, for Australia.
One in six, or thereabouts.
So, if we’re looking to go on from here, hit the top of the rankings and stay there, we need to ensure that the Shield is the strongest competition we can organise. It has to be hard fought, and it needs to be played on surfaces that aren’t too far removed from Test cricket.
Shield cricket should have batsmen amassing substantial scores against bowlers who are looking to insert themselves in the pecking order when it comes to Australian selection. They need to be doing that on wickets that offer pace and bounce on Day One, flatten out on Days Two and Three and start to take turn on Day Four.
We should be taking a serious look at playing Shield games over five days.
Ironically, one thing that will make that possible is a continuation of this season’s major innovation, playing the interstate one-day series in a block in one capital city. It doesn’t always have to be Sydney, and it probably doesn’t actually need to be a capital city, but the notion of the interstate one-daters as a pre-season comp has definite merit and is worth persisting with.
It serves as a warm-up for the Shield, which runs nicely into the Test series, and since we’re going to be burdened with a Big Bash into the foreseeable future, at least it slots nicely in towards the limited overs side of the international calendar.
And, as far as the emerging players are concerned, we need the up and coming quicks to be working on their batting through that time when their bowling workloads are being strictly managed.
We need to have all batsmen working on being able to bowl something reasonably well. Doesn’t have to be particularly flash, just an ability to land something reasonable on a fairly consistent basis, hopefully with a variation thrown in.
Every player in every squad under the age of twenty-five should also be working towards gaining professional, academic or tradesman qualifications so that they have definite prospects for life after cricket. These things should be a conscious effort on the part of the various State bodies as a way on ensuring the talent isn’t being drawn away by the football codes, which can offer bigger money at an earlier stage in the athlete’s career.
And, whatever we do, when all that starts to sound a little bit too close to routine and mundane, and we’re tempted to do something fancy, we need to give ourselves a pinch, and adopt a constant mantra of Keep it simple, stupid.
Oh, and nothing resembling a thirty-eight page document outlining the dietary requirements, thank you very much.
Sunday, December 29, 2013
It's (Still) Not Rocket Surgery
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…
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…
Thursday, December 26, 2013
Melbourne Day One
Having managed to sleep in, which ruled out a morning walk, and with plenty of writing backlog to work on it took a while to turn my attention to the events of Day One in Melbourne.
An hour’s walk would have provided something to hang England’s 6-226 on, but on a slow day you’d have to dig fairly thoroughly if you were going to avoid being overly negative. You could, after all, make a fairly solid case for watching paint dry as more interesting than the English run crawl.
Record chase more entertaining than run chase was one headline that caught the eye on the ABC News website, and wasn’t far off the mark. The so called world record for attendance, of course, probably isn’t. There have almost certainly been larger crowds at Kolkata’s Eden Gardens, and there have definitely been many more entertaining Day Ones.
The key issue, having missed Adelaide and Melbourne, has been the decision to insert the old enemy after winning the toss, when the natural inclination in almost every set of circumstances is to win the toss and bat.
Clarke certainly didn’t seem that sure it was a good idea, but there are two angles that might be worth pondering.
First, of course, there might just have been something in the pitch, and it was good luck rather than good management that got Root through to the Lunch score of 1-71. Cook lasted an hour or so, and with an extra break through in that first session England could well have gone into a downhill slide. Three catches would have helped in that regard as well, and it’s interesting looking at the day’s play to ponder how much damage has been done to the English esprit de corps.
They’re not quite broken. Yet. But it might be close.
One thing that did disturb me was the lack of an aggressive response to blatant time wasting by Kevin Pietersen towards the end of the day’s play. Maybe he was just out to do what he could to get his side through to Stumps without further damage, but I suspect there was an additional bit of Niggle in there. It wasn’t what you’d call subtle time-wasting.
I would have liked to see a rather aggressive approach to the umpires, something along the lines of making sure he has to pay if we get slugged for slow over rates. The consensus in the commentary box seemed to be a belief there was very little the umpires could do about it, but I’d have been interested in seeing what would have happened if a protest about time-wasting had been followed by an appeal for Obstructing the Field.
To quote the first sentence of Law 37: Either batsman is out Obstructing the field if he wilfully attempts to obstruct or distract the fielding side by word or action.
You’re not going to get it, of course. But you ask. And, just maybe, by repeating the appeal ad nauseam when the fielding side is in position and ready to go, and KP is wasting time you’re underlining the fact that you’re onto what he’s up to.
And a bush lawyer would be able to make plenty out of those words willfully attempts, obstruct or distract and action.
The other thing with the decision to insert might have been a degree of interest in seeing how we go when the coin falls the other way and the opposition decide to bat. Given the notion that the coin falls fifty-fifty you’d possibly want to see how things run in that sort of situation when the coin fails to co-operate.
But there’d also be a degree of seeing how close to broken they are, matched with the knowledge that we’re in for a much more competitive series in a month and a half’s time.
Juggling my attention between the resumption of play and the attempt to fill in the commentary, at thuds point, having just seen Johnson strike twice, with Pietersen as the second victim, let’s just turn our attention to the screen.
An hour’s walk would have provided something to hang England’s 6-226 on, but on a slow day you’d have to dig fairly thoroughly if you were going to avoid being overly negative. You could, after all, make a fairly solid case for watching paint dry as more interesting than the English run crawl.
Record chase more entertaining than run chase was one headline that caught the eye on the ABC News website, and wasn’t far off the mark. The so called world record for attendance, of course, probably isn’t. There have almost certainly been larger crowds at Kolkata’s Eden Gardens, and there have definitely been many more entertaining Day Ones.
The key issue, having missed Adelaide and Melbourne, has been the decision to insert the old enemy after winning the toss, when the natural inclination in almost every set of circumstances is to win the toss and bat.
Clarke certainly didn’t seem that sure it was a good idea, but there are two angles that might be worth pondering.
First, of course, there might just have been something in the pitch, and it was good luck rather than good management that got Root through to the Lunch score of 1-71. Cook lasted an hour or so, and with an extra break through in that first session England could well have gone into a downhill slide. Three catches would have helped in that regard as well, and it’s interesting looking at the day’s play to ponder how much damage has been done to the English esprit de corps.
They’re not quite broken. Yet. But it might be close.
One thing that did disturb me was the lack of an aggressive response to blatant time wasting by Kevin Pietersen towards the end of the day’s play. Maybe he was just out to do what he could to get his side through to Stumps without further damage, but I suspect there was an additional bit of Niggle in there. It wasn’t what you’d call subtle time-wasting.
I would have liked to see a rather aggressive approach to the umpires, something along the lines of making sure he has to pay if we get slugged for slow over rates. The consensus in the commentary box seemed to be a belief there was very little the umpires could do about it, but I’d have been interested in seeing what would have happened if a protest about time-wasting had been followed by an appeal for Obstructing the Field.
To quote the first sentence of Law 37: Either batsman is out Obstructing the field if he wilfully attempts to obstruct or distract the fielding side by word or action.
You’re not going to get it, of course. But you ask. And, just maybe, by repeating the appeal ad nauseam when the fielding side is in position and ready to go, and KP is wasting time you’re underlining the fact that you’re onto what he’s up to.
And a bush lawyer would be able to make plenty out of those words willfully attempts, obstruct or distract and action.
The other thing with the decision to insert might have been a degree of interest in seeing how we go when the coin falls the other way and the opposition decide to bat. Given the notion that the coin falls fifty-fifty you’d possibly want to see how things run in that sort of situation when the coin fails to co-operate.
But there’d also be a degree of seeing how close to broken they are, matched with the knowledge that we’re in for a much more competitive series in a month and a half’s time.
Juggling my attention between the resumption of play and the attempt to fill in the commentary, at thuds point, having just seen Johnson strike twice, with Pietersen as the second victim, let’s just turn our attention to the screen.
Monday, December 23, 2013
Resuming the Commentary
While I was always confident we’d be retrieving The Ashes from foreign interests by the end of this series I didn't expect to be sitting down two days out from Boxing Day contemplating a five-nil whitewash.
The Inquisitive Reader may have been wondering at the lengthy silence following the win at The Gabba, something that stemmed from the fact that Hughesy wasn’t in the country. We were still part way through the English half of the two part series when I heard about a run of four Elvis Costello Spinning Songbook concerts in Japan. That looked like a reasonable excuse to head across to ride around on bullet trains.
The Interested Reader will find details of those shows over on The LHoC Music blog, or the LHoC web site but in between concerts and shinkansen excursions I was actually following the scores. Things would have been better if the feed from the Cricket Australia app on the iPad wasn’t geoblocked, but you can’t have everything.
And even with the prospect of a whitewash there’s no room for complacency because from what I’ve read it looks like we’re still only operating around 95%.
The important thing to remember before we get down to gloating is that this is a side that has been assembled to complete a task, and while we’re well on the way to doing that, a couple of issues will need to be dealt with on the way to reclaiming that #1 Test ranking, which is what we’re after.
Look at the current side and we’ve got Rogers, Haddin and the pace bowling trio that's the heart of what may well be the best attack going around at the moment (Australia's attack 'best in the world' - McDermott) all needing to replaced in the medium term, and we also need to build up the spin bowling department for future tours to spin-friendly environments on the subcontinent.
We’ve also got the prospect of a three Test Series in South Africa in the New Year, and one notes recent developments that suggest we’ll need to be firing on all cylinders if we’re going to win that one. We’re still ranked #5 on 101 with South Africa well ahead of the pack on 131 (India 119, England 116, Pakistan 102). They’ve got de Villiers, Amla and Smith at 1, 2 and 9 in the batting rankings (Clarke 5) and Philander and Steyn at 1 and 2 in the bowling (Harris and Siddle 5 and 6).
And while it’s rather pleasant to watch the wheels start to fall off the much vaunted England line up one notes suggestions of burnout as a significant factor. They’ve kept a fairly tight core of players together through a lot of cricket, and the strain is going to show eventually. We don't want to end up in the same pickle.
On our part, we’re looking for a long term replacement for Rogers as The Steady Opener, cover for Watson as The All Rounder (or, if you prefer, The Batsman Who Bowls), Haddin behind the stumps and depth and variation in the spin bowling department (Backup Offie, as well as a leftie and a left arm orthodox). Throw in another top order bat and someone who can bat in the middle and you’d have the makings of a decent medium to long term prospect.
Those players need to be identified and brought on, with a degree of rotation involved when we play the likes of Zimbabwe, Bangla Desh, the West Indies and New Zealand.
The fast bowling department looks reasonably good, with plenty of depth coming through, but there are two questions over that way. The first, of course, is getting them on to the park, something that we haven’t quite managed to do consistently. If you’re not convinced of that, take a squiz at the injury list.
Then, assuming you’ve got the resources fit and ready to fire, it’s a question of getting the right mix. In many ways, this current attack reminds me of the bowling group that got us home against the West Indies back in 1995. That attack went into a Test series having just lost McDermott to injury, and while it included Warne and an emerging McGrath the other two quicks (Reiffel and Julian) aren’t going to end up being ranked along Australia’s all-time greats.
That lineup, however, offered a blend of talents that gave options to attack the West Indies batting order, and, just as importantly, weren’t afraid to ruffle the West Indian tailenders who were used to monstering the opposition without getting a great deal of retaliation when they batted.
One notes some of the same thing happening here where Messrs Anderson and Broad are concerned.
So when it comes to replacing Johnson, Harris and Siddle it might not be a case of a straight like for like swap. Johnson may be The Leftie With the Terror Factor, but that doesn’t mean he can be replaced by, say, Starc, who may be The Leftie, but mightn’t fit into the Terrifying Pace side of things.
No, it’s a matter of getting the right combination, and that’s not necessarily going to be a matter of selecting the three most obvious choices.
The other matter that needs to be commented on is, of course, the rapid depletion of English resources in this series, and I’d direct The Argumentative Reader’s attention in that direction if he or she thinks I’m getting a little over the top in the comments above.
The first point to be made here is that we’ve turned on the aggression and the verbals, and one notes a report in this morning’s ABC News digest where Graeme Swann’s granny is blaming unwelcoming Australians for the lad’s decision to retire.
There are two telling comments in that report.
"I do not think they have been (made) very welcome, the team. He is not easily upset, there is something nasty happened.”
Well, you don’t (or shouldn’t) expect to be welcomed with open arms when you’re looking towards a four-series drubbing of your hosts. One doesn’t get the impression there are open arms when our blokes step onto the paddock over there. The words Barmy and Army spring to mind here.
She’s also reported as saying "When the team went down to Australia and that young lad [Jonathan Trott] came back, there was something going wrong then,” which moves the debate over the verbals into a whole new ball game.
Now, you might think that what I’m about to say is heartless, and you may be right, but both Trott and Swann came into this series with their own issues.
With Trott the psychological issues were, to some extent, known, and how much the Australian side knew about his actual mental state doesn’t matter. He was known to be a stickler for routine, fussy about his preparation for each ball he faced and that makes him liable to a little hurry up.
If I’d been on the field when he was batting I’d have been making fairly pointed comments about time wasting, particularly if it was the morning of Day One and I was looking to get through thirty overs before lunch.
As far as any damage inflicted is concerned, in this context I’m reminded of a sequence of photos I saw somewhere years ago.
Taken at what may have been a County match they showed a batsman, possibly Colin Cowdrey, lying on the ground after being struck by an Andy Roberts bouncer. There were a number of concerned individuals clustered around the figure on the ground, but Roberts wasn’t one of them.
Roberts was standing at the top of his run, ready to steam in for the next delivery.
Apparently, questioned about what might be interpreted as a heartless attitude, Roberts said something like “It’s my job to bowl it. It’s his job to deal with it.”
Go down the track and take a look at the damage you’ve done and you may lose some of your effectiveness. Using the short ball to get a batsman moving onto the back foot, then spearing in the yorker to clean him up is a fairly standard strategy. If the batsman’s technique of dealing with the short stuff has him swaying back and being hit by a ball that follows him, it isn’t the bowler’s fault.
No, if he’s batting Three he has to expect pressure, and it’s the opposition’s job to deliver it.
In Swann’s case, elbow surgery had already reduced his effectiveness, and Lehmann is on record as saying the plan was to attack him in an endeavour to force Cook to bring back the quicks (and, more than likely, bowl them to the point where they’re increasingly susceptible to injury).
What is interesting, at least from where I’m sitting, is that Swann opted to come on tour knowing he wasn’t going to be able to deliver the lengthy spells he had been used to, and then, faced with the prospect of a five-nil drubbing with a major question mark over whether Broad will take the field and turn out to be fully effective, chose to make an early departure from a side that had already been considerably weakened.
But, for all that, now I’m in a position to resume watching, roll on Boxing Day…
The Inquisitive Reader may have been wondering at the lengthy silence following the win at The Gabba, something that stemmed from the fact that Hughesy wasn’t in the country. We were still part way through the English half of the two part series when I heard about a run of four Elvis Costello Spinning Songbook concerts in Japan. That looked like a reasonable excuse to head across to ride around on bullet trains.
The Interested Reader will find details of those shows over on The LHoC Music blog, or the LHoC web site but in between concerts and shinkansen excursions I was actually following the scores. Things would have been better if the feed from the Cricket Australia app on the iPad wasn’t geoblocked, but you can’t have everything.
And even with the prospect of a whitewash there’s no room for complacency because from what I’ve read it looks like we’re still only operating around 95%.
The important thing to remember before we get down to gloating is that this is a side that has been assembled to complete a task, and while we’re well on the way to doing that, a couple of issues will need to be dealt with on the way to reclaiming that #1 Test ranking, which is what we’re after.
Look at the current side and we’ve got Rogers, Haddin and the pace bowling trio that's the heart of what may well be the best attack going around at the moment (Australia's attack 'best in the world' - McDermott) all needing to replaced in the medium term, and we also need to build up the spin bowling department for future tours to spin-friendly environments on the subcontinent.
We’ve also got the prospect of a three Test Series in South Africa in the New Year, and one notes recent developments that suggest we’ll need to be firing on all cylinders if we’re going to win that one. We’re still ranked #5 on 101 with South Africa well ahead of the pack on 131 (India 119, England 116, Pakistan 102). They’ve got de Villiers, Amla and Smith at 1, 2 and 9 in the batting rankings (Clarke 5) and Philander and Steyn at 1 and 2 in the bowling (Harris and Siddle 5 and 6).
And while it’s rather pleasant to watch the wheels start to fall off the much vaunted England line up one notes suggestions of burnout as a significant factor. They’ve kept a fairly tight core of players together through a lot of cricket, and the strain is going to show eventually. We don't want to end up in the same pickle.
On our part, we’re looking for a long term replacement for Rogers as The Steady Opener, cover for Watson as The All Rounder (or, if you prefer, The Batsman Who Bowls), Haddin behind the stumps and depth and variation in the spin bowling department (Backup Offie, as well as a leftie and a left arm orthodox). Throw in another top order bat and someone who can bat in the middle and you’d have the makings of a decent medium to long term prospect.
Those players need to be identified and brought on, with a degree of rotation involved when we play the likes of Zimbabwe, Bangla Desh, the West Indies and New Zealand.
The fast bowling department looks reasonably good, with plenty of depth coming through, but there are two questions over that way. The first, of course, is getting them on to the park, something that we haven’t quite managed to do consistently. If you’re not convinced of that, take a squiz at the injury list.
Then, assuming you’ve got the resources fit and ready to fire, it’s a question of getting the right mix. In many ways, this current attack reminds me of the bowling group that got us home against the West Indies back in 1995. That attack went into a Test series having just lost McDermott to injury, and while it included Warne and an emerging McGrath the other two quicks (Reiffel and Julian) aren’t going to end up being ranked along Australia’s all-time greats.
That lineup, however, offered a blend of talents that gave options to attack the West Indies batting order, and, just as importantly, weren’t afraid to ruffle the West Indian tailenders who were used to monstering the opposition without getting a great deal of retaliation when they batted.
One notes some of the same thing happening here where Messrs Anderson and Broad are concerned.
So when it comes to replacing Johnson, Harris and Siddle it might not be a case of a straight like for like swap. Johnson may be The Leftie With the Terror Factor, but that doesn’t mean he can be replaced by, say, Starc, who may be The Leftie, but mightn’t fit into the Terrifying Pace side of things.
No, it’s a matter of getting the right combination, and that’s not necessarily going to be a matter of selecting the three most obvious choices.
The other matter that needs to be commented on is, of course, the rapid depletion of English resources in this series, and I’d direct The Argumentative Reader’s attention in that direction if he or she thinks I’m getting a little over the top in the comments above.
The first point to be made here is that we’ve turned on the aggression and the verbals, and one notes a report in this morning’s ABC News digest where Graeme Swann’s granny is blaming unwelcoming Australians for the lad’s decision to retire.
There are two telling comments in that report.
"I do not think they have been (made) very welcome, the team. He is not easily upset, there is something nasty happened.”
Well, you don’t (or shouldn’t) expect to be welcomed with open arms when you’re looking towards a four-series drubbing of your hosts. One doesn’t get the impression there are open arms when our blokes step onto the paddock over there. The words Barmy and Army spring to mind here.
She’s also reported as saying "When the team went down to Australia and that young lad [Jonathan Trott] came back, there was something going wrong then,” which moves the debate over the verbals into a whole new ball game.
Now, you might think that what I’m about to say is heartless, and you may be right, but both Trott and Swann came into this series with their own issues.
With Trott the psychological issues were, to some extent, known, and how much the Australian side knew about his actual mental state doesn’t matter. He was known to be a stickler for routine, fussy about his preparation for each ball he faced and that makes him liable to a little hurry up.
If I’d been on the field when he was batting I’d have been making fairly pointed comments about time wasting, particularly if it was the morning of Day One and I was looking to get through thirty overs before lunch.
As far as any damage inflicted is concerned, in this context I’m reminded of a sequence of photos I saw somewhere years ago.
Taken at what may have been a County match they showed a batsman, possibly Colin Cowdrey, lying on the ground after being struck by an Andy Roberts bouncer. There were a number of concerned individuals clustered around the figure on the ground, but Roberts wasn’t one of them.
Roberts was standing at the top of his run, ready to steam in for the next delivery.
Apparently, questioned about what might be interpreted as a heartless attitude, Roberts said something like “It’s my job to bowl it. It’s his job to deal with it.”
Go down the track and take a look at the damage you’ve done and you may lose some of your effectiveness. Using the short ball to get a batsman moving onto the back foot, then spearing in the yorker to clean him up is a fairly standard strategy. If the batsman’s technique of dealing with the short stuff has him swaying back and being hit by a ball that follows him, it isn’t the bowler’s fault.
No, if he’s batting Three he has to expect pressure, and it’s the opposition’s job to deliver it.
In Swann’s case, elbow surgery had already reduced his effectiveness, and Lehmann is on record as saying the plan was to attack him in an endeavour to force Cook to bring back the quicks (and, more than likely, bowl them to the point where they’re increasingly susceptible to injury).
What is interesting, at least from where I’m sitting, is that Swann opted to come on tour knowing he wasn’t going to be able to deliver the lengthy spells he had been used to, and then, faced with the prospect of a five-nil drubbing with a major question mark over whether Broad will take the field and turn out to be fully effective, chose to make an early departure from a side that had already been considerably weakened.
But, for all that, now I’m in a position to resume watching, roll on Boxing Day…
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