Tag Archives: Lyon

Cummins Needs Runs

2020-21 India in Aus, , ,

The only way Australia wins Test matches at present is if the bowlers do the work. With the batsmen underperforming as a group, it takes Cummins, Starc, Hazlewood and Lyon to do the heavy lifting, as they did in the first Test against India in Adelaide. Cummins is now the #1-ranked Test bowler in the world, with Hazlewood and Starc coming at #5 and #7, respectively.

But something else is happening which few have said much about: the tail is getting longer because Cummins isn’t making runs. And it’s becoming a pretty serious problem, especially as the top order continues to flounder. Conventional wisdom suggests that when a bowler is taking wickets, the confidence he/she gets feeds through to runs with the bat. That isn’t happening with Cummins. In fact, he is looking more and more uncertain and tentative at the crease.

Until five years ago, the batting contribution of Australia’s bowlers was the envy of other teams, with Ryan Harris averaging 21.53 with the bat and Mitchell Johnson 22.20. Mitchell Starc chimed in with 26.92 in his first 25 Tests.

In his first eighteen Tests, Cummins performed solidly with the willow at No. 8, making 528 runs at 21.12. The highlight came in the second innings of the Third Test against India in Melbourne in December 2018, when he top-scored with 63 out of a team total of 261 (unsuccessfully chasing 399 to win).

HOWEVER, things have changed. In his most recent 14 Tests, Cummins has made a measly 150 runs from eighteen innings at an average of 9.38 and a highest score of 26. From those eighteen starts, he has reached double figures only five times. He averaged 10.14 during the 2019 Ashes series and 9.60 in the 2019-2020 series against Pakistan and New Zealand.

For a No. 8 Test batsman, an average of under 10 is alarming, and it’s a headache for the team. Cummins’ opposite number in the Indian team, Ravi Ashwin, for example, averages 26 at No. 8. Dan Vettori used to average over 39. Shaun Pollock and Kapil Dev both averaged over 30 at No. 8. Even Shane Warne managed over 18.

Meanwhile, at No. 9, Mitchell Starc’s career batting average has dropped a little since the middle of the decade, but still stands at 22.15. In his last ten Test appearances, in fact, Starc has scored 200 runs at 28.57. Even Nathan Lyon has been outscoring Cummins. Over his past dozen Tests, Lyon has scored 141 runs at 14.10. In other words, Lyon is currently generating a batting average roughly fifty percent higher than that of Cummins while batting at No. 10.

So am I suggesting Cummins’ place in the team is under threat? Of course not. Given the way he’s bowling, he could bat at No. 11 and still keep his place. But on current form, he should drop to No. 9 and let Starc take the No. 8 slot.

It would be handy to know what Justin Langer & Co. intend to do to help Cummins regain his form with the bat. While they’re at it, perhaps they could answer two of the most baffling questions of the decade: what exactly do Australia’s batting coaches do, and why isn’t it feeding through to results?

Selectors Colour Blind on Finch

2018-19 India in Aus, , , , , , , , , , , ,

One of the biggest criticisms of Australia’s Test selectors is that they are inconsistent in their selection criteria. They imply that performance in red ball cricket is of paramount importance, yet they have in recent years rolled the dice on untested youngsters (e.g. Ashton Agar) or on players who have done well in white ball cricket. (e.g. George Bailey).

The Test squad selected for the first two Tests of the 2018-19 Indian summer is a reasonably sound one. It faces an uphill battle to defeat India because there is so little batting talent in Australia to choose from, but at least it’s consistent in that most of the batsmen can justify their selection on the strength of their red ball cricket, if for no other reason that there is nobody better to take their place.

Khawaja? Yes, fine. Travis Head? Well….I suppose so. Just. He’s been unconvincing but has done just well enough to get another chance given his youth. Marcus Harris is not a ‘bolter’ as the media has said. He has averaged north of 40 for both of the past two completed Shield seasons and is averaging 86.40 so far this season. He deserves his shot, and 26 is a good age to have learned his craft and to hit the accelerator. I hope Matt Renshaw gets his act together because he has youth on his side and just seems to ooze potential from every pore, but Harris edged him out, fair and square. Peter Handscomb might not make the starting eleven on 6 December but he, too, has a good combination of track record and recent performance. Even the hellishly inconsistent Shaun Marsh deserves his position based on recent performances. His brother, Mitchell, more assuredly does not deserve his, but the selectors have made it clear Mitchell Marsh will be picked if he can more or less stand upright. Yes, he made 151 against Queensland at Allan Border Field recently but who hasn’t made a score like that on that wicket? It’s a road. Put me in on that wicket. I’ll make 150, too.

But I digress.

The glaring exception is Aaron Finch. Why on earth is he described by all and sundry as a ‘lock’ for the First Test? Finch is a nice bloke and an experienced hand, but there is no evidence (and I mean none) to suggest he is among Australia’s top six red ball batsmen. After 79 first-class matches, he averages 36.58 and has made a mere 7 centuries from 131 innings. In the 2017-18 Shield season, he played 8 matches but averaged only 35.28 with only a single century. His selection is being described by the coaches as justfied based on innings of 62, 49, 39 and 31 in the 2-Test series against Pakistan in the UAE. Not long ago, Glenn Maxwell was denied a Test spot because it was said he needed to make hundreds. Now, personally I think Maxwell is overrated and does not necessarily deserve to be in the Test team, but if that is the rule for selection, why on earth is Finch a ‘lock’? It makes no sense. He currently appears to be out of form, but Finch is primarily a white ball specialist who swings hard for the fences without moving his feet. C’mon, he is not a Test batsman. I hope very much to be proven wrong, but if he opens for Australia on 6 December, I suspect he will fail against what is the best Indian pace attack to visit these shores for a long time.

If one is honest and logical, there is no place for Finch.

If the selectors really mean what they say and wish to strike the proper balance between performance and potential in red ball cricket, and if they absolutely insist on retaining M Marsh, the top six should be:

M Harris
M Renshaw
U Khawaja
S Marsh
T Head or P Handscomb
M Marsh
T Paine
P Cummins
M Starc
N Lyon
J Hazlewood

Personally, I would jettison M Marsh and play both Head and Handscomb with four bowlers (after all, Head can bowl some part-time offies), but as I said, the selectors appear illogically committed to M Marsh.

Paine’s position deserves plenty of debate, but we’ll save that for another post.

Not Rocket Science

2017 Aus in Bangladesh, , , , ,

The post-mortem from the 1st Test against Bangladesh in Mirpur doesn’t need to be long. In fact, it would be a mistake to over-analyse it.

1) Bangladesh are not the easy-beats they used to be. They’ve beaten England and Sri Lanka in the past year. Any cricket ‘writer’ who was surprised by Bangladesh’s victory probably covers the rugby league in the off season.

2) Australia did not prepare. Australia started well in India in February then fell in a steaming heap thereafter. A few of them went off to the IPL, and a few participated in a very half-hearted Champions Trophy campaign. None played red ball cricket for five months. And don’t anyone try and claim that a brief training camp in Darwin represented serious preparation. It was better than nothing, but not by much.

3) Australia is only a mediocre team. Its only world-class Test cricketers are Smith, Starc (currently absent), Hazlewood and Lyon. Warner could arguably now join that list, but if it wasn’t for his 2nd-innings ton in Mirpur, I would not have included him. Warner is mostly a flat track bully who has always struggled against spin, so he actually deserves a lot of kudos for being the only batsman to dig deep and produce a good innings in Mirpur. I honestly didn’t think he was capable of that knock. I would go as far as to speculate that it might prolong his career, coming at a time when his confidence must have been starting to flag after a string of low scores.

4) Bangladesh didn’t play all that well, but Australia played really really badly. I don’t want to be mean to Bangladesh, but they didn’t really play above-average cricket. It’s just that Australia played awfully, specifically with the bat. The spinners on both teams bowled adequately, with the spectacularly uneven bounce helping them a lot. Tamim Iqbal, Shakib Al-Hasan, Renshaw and Warner proved that runs could be scored if only one was prepared to work for them, but the Australian batsmen again lacked the skill and discipline. As Smith admitted after the match, they forgot whatever they had learned in India. Why? See Points 2) and 3) above.

The changes required for the 2nd Test in Chittagong are pretty obvious (which doesn’t mean the selectors will make them).

Matthew Wade must go. I don’t blame him one bit for letting through a lot of byes on that nightmare Mirpur pitch but his batting is nothing short of abysmal. He is now a dead weight, and nowhere near the player he once was. Peter Handscomb is by no means a long-term Test ‘keeper, but Australia needs batsmen, and it needs them NOW. Wade must be dropped and Handscomb given the gloves in Chittagong, thereby allowing Hilton Cartwright an audition. Before the Ashes begin in November, the selectors can observe the leading contenders for ‘keeper-batsman in the first three rounds of the Sheffield Shield. Maybe they’ll go back to Peter Nevill, maybe they’ll try someone else, but to pretend Wade is Test standard is to indulge dangerous self-delusion.

Other than that, the only other change to make appears to have been made; i.e. bring in a third spinner and have Cummins as the sole quick.

Glenn Maxwell must also go but that can wait until after this series.

Lay Off the Selectors

2015 Ashes, , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Let’s be honest, we cricket fans have all had a whinge about the selectors from time to time. In the aftermath of the Ashes loss in England, the knives are out for a lot of people, including Rod Marsh and his team.

I think that’s unjustified. The selectors did a pretty good job on this Ashes tour, and do not deserve much of the criticism they’ve received.

“I’m just racking my brain to try and think of who else we could have picked,” Marsh has said.

He’s right.

There really wasn’t anybody else who genuinely justified selection. There were good reasons to pick each member of the Ashes squad with the exception of Shane Watson and Shaun Marsh. These two players have a long track record of underperformance and inconsistency at Test level. Neither player has the skill or mental aptitude for Test cricket, and both have spent years demonstrating that.

But the truth is it would not have mattered much.

Neither Watson nor Shaun Marsh was responsible for the loss of the Ashes. I’m sure you could point fingers at more than these three, but Steve Smith, Michael Clarke and Adam Voges were primarily responsible for the series loss due to their inability to score runs at Edgbaston and Trent Bridge. Yes, Johnson, Starc and Hazlewood certainly could have bowled a better line and length, but they were always defending low totals. The main problem was the middle order batting.

Generally, selectors pick players who have been making runs and taking wickets. They did that.

The veterans in the squad such as Clarke and Brad Haddin had good track records, and although their runs had been drying up, Clarke made 128 against India as recently as December. Chris Rogers, David Warner and Smith all played well prior to the Ashes. Voges averaged over 100 last season in the Sheffield Shield and has a long and impressive first class career – why wouldn’t you pick him? After the World Cup, you couldn’t go past Mitchell Starc, and you’d pick Mitchell Johnson on the strength of the 2013-14 Ashes series even if the guy hadn’t rolled his arm over since. Josh Hazlewood was very impressive in his early career, and Nathan Lyon only gets better and better.

True, the Mitchell Marsh experiment didn’t work out, but he was worth a shot. Given Watson’s extended run of poor form, it was a well worth giving Mitchell Marsh a chance after Cardiff. He is definitely not a Test No. 6 batsman, but at 23 he has time on his side, and should be sent back to the Sheffield Shield to make some runs. Marsh is not the first young player to be thrown into the cauldron a little bit too early (Steve Smith was woeful when first he played Test cricket), and he has enormous potential.

Moreover, I give the selectors great kudos for swapping Haddin for Peter Nevill after Cardiff, and am pretty sick and tired of ex-players stirring the pot and whingeing that the ‘family first’ policy should have ensured a game for Haddin at Lord’s. Nevill was a better bet than Haddin, and the selectors made a tough call. They deserve more credit for it.

Oh, and the idea that Peter Siddle should have played at Trent Bridge? C’mon…. It wouldn’t have made any difference. The sad, brutal truth is that Sidds is now only a back-up bowler who would probably not have been in the squad at all if James Pattinson and Pat Cummins were fit and had enough recent red ball cricket under their belts. It’s a cruel statement, but fair. Siddle is down on pace and not the force he once was. The selectors know this. They were right to omit him.

Darren Lehmann has said that swapping out Mitchell Marsh for his brother Shaun in the Fourth Test was a selection error, but again, this selection made little difference to the series result. As mentioned above, Shaun Marsh has been nothing but a disappointment at Test level and should never have been in the squad, but ultimately the series was slipping away by the time he was called up and it would not have mattered which Marsh was selected.

So in my view, Watson and Shaun Marsh are the two black marks against the selectors, but they earn one back for the replacement of Haddin with Nevill. Moreover, they shouldn’t be pilloried for picking either Mitchell Marsh or Voges.

And should any of the up-and-comers have been picked? Joe Burns, Cameron Bancroft and Usman Khawaja are having a good tour of India with Australia A this month, and all three stand a chance of achieving (or regaining) a Test place in coming months. But were they battering down the selectors’ door before the Ashes tour? Not really.

Pat Howard, the performance manager of the Australian team, has gone on record blaming himself for (among other things) trying to prepare Ryan Harris for the series, picking a ‘Dad’s Army’ team and having the selectors announce one touring party for both the West Indies and England.

It’s very noble of Howard to accept blame for the loss of the Ashes, but I struggle to see how any of his alleged transgressions were responsible.

As I’ve noted before (see my earlier post ‘Mythbusting’), Harris was always unlikely to be ready to play. Even if he did play, he was 18 months older than in the previous Ashes series and there was no guarantee he would have been anywhere as effective. Suggestions that Australia ‘missed’ Harris are misguided. Australia might have missed the bowler Harris used to be, but he probably would not have been that bowler in the current series anyway.

As for Howard’s reference to ‘Dad’s Army’, I’m not sure what he’s referring to (but mind you, I don’t what his job entails anyway). It was the selectors’ job to pick the side, not Howard’s, and as I’ve opined above, they did a decent job. I’m not sure exactly what Howard is accepting blame for.

Finally, Australia flew straight from the West Indies to England. At no point between the two series was there sufficient time for other Australians to play enough first-class cricket to impress the selectors. So even if the selectors had decided to pick an entirely new squad for the Ashes at the end of the West Indies series, who would they have chosen other than the players they already had?

Howard has said he welcomes any review of his position. Great – perhaps we’ll find out what he actually does and why it matters.

In the meantime, I think the critics should lay off the selectors. They’re doing okay.