Mitchell Marsh has gone home injured from India, hounded by cruel but accurate headlines labelling him Australia’s worst ever No. 6. It’s not his fault – it’s the selectors who persist in filling the No. 6 slot with a so-called ‘all-rounder’ who bats a bit and bowls a bit but does neither well enough to help win a Test match for his team.
And now they’ve done it again.
Marcus Stoinis?
Really?
Why would you pick this guy for the Test team on the back of one (admittedly phenomenal) ODI innings against New Zealand? Like Hilton Cartwright and Moises Henriques before him, Stoinis bowls lollipop medium-pacers which India’s batsmen will chew up and spit out on their low, slow wickets. And he’s not a good enough batsman to play at No. 6 in the Test team. He simply isn’t (and neither was Mitchell Marsh). So why fly him to India? It makes no sense.
And if they don’t play Stoinis in the 3rd Test, will they play Usman Khawaja? A sensible short-term solution, perhaps, but Uzzy is not a No. 6 batsman. He’s an opener.
Oh, and by the way, Glenn Maxwell certainly isn’t the answer, either. Substitute ‘off-spinners that don’t spin’ for ‘lollipop medium pacers’ in the paragraph above, and all the same arguments apply. Maxwell should not even be in the Test squad. He hasn’t earned it. He’s not good enough.
The Australian selectors seem to have forgotten how much better the team fared when it had a proper batsman at No. 6. Come back, Mike Hussey, we miss you. The obvious solution is to find a proper middle-order batsman. Australia has done well in India with two decent seamers and two decent spinners. It doesn’t need a third seamer, or a third spinner. Even with Starc flying home, you could play Jackson Bird or if you must have more pace, fly Pat Cummins out to India. I don’t think it makes any difference. Honestly, I think Bird will do fine. He lacks Starc’s threatening pace but he’s a lot more accurate.
When desperate after the series loss to South Africa, the selectors resorted to picking a couple of young batsmen who had (shock, horror,gasp) a good if somewhat short track record in the Sheffield Shield. Remember the Sheffield Shield? So far, Matt Renshaw and Peter Handscomb have done pretty well. Both look likely to improve.
Why not stick with that approach? Australia needs a decent No. 6 batsman. There are two obvious candidates.
One is Kurtis Patterson, who bats at No. 4 for NSW. He will be 24 in May. He has played 39 first-class matches and has an average of 42.83 with 5 centuries. So far this season, he’s scored 621 runs at 47.77, with one ton and six half-centuries.
The other is Jake Lehmann, who bats at No. 5 for South Australia. The 24-year old Lehmann has played 25 first-class matches and has an average of 46.41 with 5 centuries. So far this season, he’s made 646 runs at 49.69.
I reckon either Patterson or Jake Lehmann would be worthwhile selections. They both resemble Renshaw and Handscomb: young, and with a decent track record. The selectors are on to a good strategy. They should stick with it and abandon this catastrophic policy of picking a mediocre player to bat at No. 6.