Tag Archives: Ashes 2013

The Ashes: Australia to win … and here are 5 reasons why

July 9, 2013 By in Shumpty Speaks Tags: , , , , 1 Comment

Tomorrow night at 8pm the Ashes series between the old foes, Australia and England, will commence. Everyone, including most Australian fans it seems, think England is going to win. I disagree … in fact I vehemently disagree! Here are my five reasons why I believe Australia will win back the Urn:

England are smug and think they are going to win:

Everything we, as fans, have heard from the pundits from the old dart is that this is the worst Australian team to travel to England since Federation and that the Australians have no chance of winning. The last time we heard such punditary from those apparent experts was in 1989 when Australia travelled to England with a squad the performance of which hinged on a new opening pairing, an allrounder without a hundred in 5 years of test cricket, an inexperienced ‘keeper and a bowling attack that mixed some old stagers (Alderman and Lawson) and an under pressure spinner (Hohns). Sound familiar? The main reason I think we will win is because the English think they will win and that approach has failed them in the past.

Is Australia’s form that bad?

OK: it is obvious that Australia’s form in Test Cricket coming into this series is not great. A 4-0 loss to India in India does not make for pretty reading. However is England’s form any more compelling? Yes they defeated New Zealand at home 2-0 but before that they did not manage a win in a three test tour against New Zealand away. All due respect to the New Zealand team that is hardly a sparkling form line itself. Before that both teams lost a series the South Africans. Of course England did perform brilliantly in India it must be conceded.

Swann v Lyon

I have written in detail about the strengths of Nathan Lyon and the fact that he is a key component in this Australian team. On the other side of the fence is Graeme Swann. Let me be clear at the outset here: I think Swann is world class. That said, his record against Australia is less than impressive. In the two series between the teams he has participated in he has taken 29 wickets at an average of 40. Last time Australia was in England he returned a less than impressive 14 wickets at 40.50 with an economy rate of 3.32 per over which is 1.22 per over higher than his economy rate for his career. Australia needs to attack Swann: England have been at their best in recent times when they have him holding up one end and drying up runs while their fast bowlers rotate up the other end. Despite Australia’s poor form against spin in India, if they attack Swann and hit him off his game that will go a long way to a win. We have to get out of the mindest that he is anything like the Indian spinners: he is not and these are not Indian wickets!

The era of Boof:

Darren Lehmann’s installation as coach of the Australian cricket can only be a positive. Simply put, Lehmann is a coach who lifted the Queensland Bulls Sheffield Shield team to two finals in two years with a player list that Cricket Australia does not deign to believe contains a test match player. Lehmann knows what it takes to win and has a history of building harmonious high performing units which it was clear the old regime was not. He is also a coach that presents as getting the best out of Shane Watson who will have a large part to play in Australia’s possible success.

Psychological warfare:

Jimmy Anderson has come out during the week and suggested that he has added sledging to his armoury. Australia has seemed to try to bring such warfare to recent performances in a somewhat hamfisted and unsuccessful way. The “Davey Warner” method of sledging and physical confrontation MUST stop! Australia needs to take a leaf out of the book of the 1989 and 1993 teams: when (if) they get on top in any of these tests and in the series they need to put the metaphorical foot on the throat of England and press down hard. I always remember the story of Allan Border in the 1993 series batting into a 3rd day to push Australia’s score over 650 just to “add to their mental disintegration”. If Australia win the mental battle they will win the series.

There is only one sleep to go before the Ashes start: it is time for Australian fans to mobilise behind our team. The fact is we can win and I think we will.

I have my supplies for the series at the ready (coffee, protein shakes and red bull), the batteries are about to be taken out of the remote control and I have banked up a heap of extra sleep to get me through. It is go time people! Let’s get our urn back!

The Ashes: England Squad Announcement

July 7, 2013 By in Shumpty Speaks Tags: , , , 1 Comment

Here is the English squad for the first Ashes 2013 test match at Trent Bridge:

A Cook (c), J Root, J Trott, K Pietersen, I Bell, J Bairstow, M Prior, T Bresnan, S Broad, G Swann, S Finn, J Anderson, P Onions

No real surprises here for the English. Obviously deep down I am hoping for a repeat of 1989 when the Poms used 39 players but doubt that is going to happen.

Bring on Wednesday!

The Ashes: We know who the openers are but who bats number 3 for Australia?

July 4, 2013 By in Shumpty Speaks Tags: , , , , , , 5 Comments

Darren Lehmann is off and running as the coach of the Australian cricket team and has started his “reign” by confirming before the last trial game before the 1st Test that Shane Watson and Chris Rogers will be the opening for Australia come 10 July. That decision means that neither of the incumbents from the last test match played by Australia, David Warner and Ed Cowan, will be retaining their former positions in the team.

Obviously, the Australian cricket team is in a state of flux with the appointment of a new coach and the only secure places in the batting order seemingly the openers (now that their positions have been confirmed) and that of the captain, wherever he decides to bat. That means that the number 3 position (assuming M Clarke doesn’t bow to the pressure of I Chappell and bat there) is up for grabs for the following contenders: P Hughes (the incumbent), D Warner, E Cowan and U Khawaja.

I think it would be fair to say that the issue of “who bats number 3?” has oft been a vexed question in Australian cricket. Regularly the best batsman in the team has been tapped on the shoulder to be the number 3 batsman. In this regard one only needs to look at where players like Don Bradman, Ricky Ponting and Greg Chappell spent the bulk of their careers in the Australia team. The only time that that standard does not seem to hold true is when the captain is also the best batsman in the team and declines to bat in that position. The eras of Allan Border and Steve Waugh are instructive in that context.

So if the best batsman in the team is the captain and declines to bat at number 3 what style of batsman should be invested with the obligation of going in at the time the first wicket goes down. In my opinion one only needs to consider the efforts of David Boon to come to the conclusion that the style of batsman that ought be given the role of number 3, in the absence of the best batsman in the team (which is not to say that Boon at points was not that batsman but I think it would be fair to say that when he started batting at 3 he was not), is an established opener. With David Boon at number 3 from the 1989 Ashes tour (bearing in mind that he had batted at 3 before this point) Australia was blessed with a batsman who had spent some 20 test matches at the top of the order for almost 1,500 runs at an average of 36.85. More to the point, in Boon Australia possessed someone who was extremely experienced in going in against the new ball such that if he was in early he was used to it.

Now at this point I am sure many of you are saying: so? We have Phil Hughes batting at number 3 for Australia and he is a former opener for his country so surely, based on your own measure, Hughes must get the gig? Simply though I do not believe that Hughes is good enough form to play the role that D Boon did for Australia for all of those years post 1989 and particularly not so for an Ashes series. Hughes is, after all, in his third coming as an Australian test cricketer and in this coming has been pigeon holed as a number 3 batsman. In his 7 test matches back in the test team he has scored 380 runs in 13 innings at an average of 29.23 and is without a hundred in that span. That is simply not good enough and I am of the view that a change needs to be made for the first test.

So which of the other contenders should be selected in Hughes’ place (if that change is made). I suspect that Darren Lehmann would be looking to avoid having a change at number 3 that would see another player who has not been in the test team of recent times in the team so that, unfortunately, counts out Usman Khawaja. Whilst I think he is a player of the future he has not done enough in my view in the preliminary games to make his selection a foregone conclusion. With avoiding too much change in mind I think Lehmann will avoid using Khawaja at number 3 on 10 July.

That makes the race for the other position in the “engine room” (as D Boon used to call it) between Ed Cowan and David Warner. Have there been two more contrasting styles in Australian cricket than these two players? As good a starting point as any is to consider their records over the last 12 months:

Cowan Warner

All told then there is not much difference between the two records save that Warner has scored more fifties and Cowan occupies the crease longer. Who should Darren Lehmann go for then come 10 July? Importantly, both records are largely commensurate with that of David Boon before he became Australia’s first choice number 3 batsmen albeit the strike rate of Boon is closer to that of Cowan than that of Warner.

I think it is important here to also consider the preparation of both players in advance of this first test. I have written earlier about trials and tribulations of David Warner this year. In raw cricket terms his lead in to the first test has consisted of playing in the IPL 20/20 competition, 2 games in the Champions Trophy and then a long stint on the sidelines (and no doubt practicing in the nets) as he serves his suspension for punching Joe Root.

Conversely, Ed Cowan has spent the start of the English summer playing first class cricket for Nottinghamshire. By the end of Australia’s current trial game against Worcestershire he will have played 9 first class games in English conditions. His form for Nottinghamshire in his 7 games for them has been solid without being flashy scoring 478 runs at 43.45. A final key point on Cowan’s run in to the first test is, that if selected, he will be playing on his home ground (for Nottinghamshire) Trent Bridge.

A final consideration here is the style of players Cowan and Warner are: can anyone cogently argue that they would feel more comfortable with Warner walking out to the crease with the score on 1/0 than Ed Cowan? I, for one, shudder at the thought of Warner coming to the crease with the score one down for not many.

All of the foregoing considered then, it must be pretty obvious the way I am leaning. If Phil Hughes is not selected, as I believe he ought not be, then I am firmly of the view that Ed Cowan should be Australia’s number 3 for the first test at Trent Bridge. The statistics, the lead in form and the stylistic considerations all point that way.

The Nathan Lyon Conundrum: the second inning fallacy

June 13, 2013 By in Shumpty Speaks Tags: , , , , Leave a comment

I wrote earlier in the week about Nathan Lyon and the obscene haste with which Fawad Ahmed seems to have been pushed forward as his replacement. I received a large number of comments with respect to that post but a common refrain was that Lyon was not a performer under pressure in the second innings of matches. I found this to be an interesting argument and sought to look deeper at it.

Simply put: I consider the argument that Nathan Lyon is not a performer in the second innings of matches, when he is supposed to be winning games for Australia, is an absolute fallacy. What follows are my reasons for this view:

Venue

Nathan Lyon has played 22 test matches for Australia. Those test matches took place at the following venues for the following results:

Lyon #1

Considering the venues in question, it can only clearly be said that the Indian venues and possibly Sydney and Adelaide are what might be termed spinning wickets or even wickets on which a spinner would be expected to win a game for his team. Simply, Lyon has not played a plethora of games at “spinning venues” to date.

How much is Lyon actually bowling?

Obviously comparisons will be made between the various spinners in the game at the moment. Here are the statistics on current spin bowlers playing test matches for their respective countries presently and their records in the second innings. I have filtered this table to only include performances since the retirement of SK Warne:

Lyon #2

The results of this analysis are obvious: Nathan Lyon only bowls some 14.54 overs in the second innings of matches. This, when compared to his fellow spinners, is arguably consistent with significant underbowling. The best bowlers of this period have consistently, in the second innings of said matches bowled, on average, more than 10 overs an inning more than the Australian spin bowler. Simply: if he is not being given the overs to bowl how can he be expected to take wickets?

The 4th Innings: that is the real question

The problem with the blanket statement that Nathan Lyon is a non-performer in the 2nd innings of matches ignores that quite often a bowler will actually be bowling in the 3rd innings of the game rather than the 4th innings. If the question is one of performance under pressure by Nathan Lyon then surely the 4th innings of matches needs to be considered and, further the target that Lyon has had to bowl at. The following table is instructive:

Lyon #3

There are some compelling points that come from this table:

1. The last 3 tests Lyon has played have seen the opposition team, India, run down small targets. He has bowled a high proportion of overs in those innings in obvious losing causes. He can not be blamed for this.

2. If you exclude the last 3 tests in India, Australia’s record when bowling in the last innings of a test match to win it is simply outstanding with only one loss to the South Africans in Capetown the only blemish. It is compelling that in that game Lyon was only given 3 overs over 50.3 on a seaming wicket and that Australia was trounced by 8 wickets.

3. I concede that there are some games in this list that Australia has won where I would have expected Lyon to play a bigger role in the win. However, there are reasons for this: for example the game against Sri Lanka in Hobart was one dominated by fast bowlers and in which Lyon played a key roll in keeping one end tight whilst the fast bowlers where rotated.

4. The draw against South Africa in Adelaide is a game that sticks in the mind of many. I think people need to look again at this game though because Lyon is the only spin bowler in a game that took a wicket. Indeed the spinner from South Africa, Imran Tahir, had game comparable to that of Bryce McGain’s first test and has not been sighted since for the Proteas.

So where does this leave N Lyon?

The fact is that at venues where one would expect Nathan Lyon to lead the Australian bowling attack to victory, particularly in India, he has never been given enough runs to actually bowl at to do so. In games that Australia has won and he has bowled a large number of overs in the final innings of the game he has, to be frank, played a significant positive roll in those victories whilst not always being the match winner. That, of itself, is admirable given that he is bowling for captain who does not bowl him anywhere near as much as his contemporaries from other countries.

To suggest that Nathan Lyon is not a “pressure bowler” and does not bowl well in the final innings of games is not supported, in my view, by the objective evidence. Of course many people will have a subjective view and that is based on their own experiences watching him play. I simply ask those of you with that different view to take a look at the numbers above and reconsider!

I think Australian cricket has, continues to, do Nathan Lyon a disservice by the seemingly constant pressure being placed on his position. He can only bowl when he is asked to and within the construct of the match situation given to him by the other ten players on the field. To say that he has done anything other than his job and that he is anything other than a solid international spinner is just a fallacy.

Postscript: the tables created for this post have been done by me from score cards retained on the Cricinfo website. Any errors are my own and I apologise for the bad formatting!

Come in spinner: why is finding one for the Australian team so hard?

June 10, 2013 By in Shumpty Speaks Tags: , , , , , Leave a comment

It has long been the lament of fans, pundits and journalists alike that in the “post Warne” age we (Australian cricket) have not had a consistently selectable or, indeed, match winning spin bowler. This problem has become so “acute” in the prelude to the coming battle for the Ashes against England that the parliament of Australia has seen fit to change the laws of immigration in this country to allow for the fast tracked citizenship of a 31 year old leg spinner from Merguz in Pakistan who has played only 13 first class games just so he may be available.

Before the “Era of Ahmed” a compendium of spin bowlers used by Australia since 5 January 2007 (when the “Era of Warne” ended) reads like this (this list necessarily removes batsmen who bowl a bit): 

SCG MacGill (4 matches)

GB Hogg (3 matches)

B Casson (1 match)

CL White (4 matches)

JJ Krejza (2 matches)

NM Hauritz (16 matches)

MA Beer (2 matches)

BE McGain (1 matches)

XJ Doherty (4 matches)

NM Lyon (22 matches)

GJ Maxwell (2 matches)

Australia has played 67 test matches in that span and have won 33, lost 21 and drawn 13 of same.  The present incumbent, Nathan Lyon, comes into the Ashes with a record that shows that he has taken 76 wickets in his 22 test matches at an average of 33.18 runs per wicket and with an economy rate of 3.12 runs per over. 
Am I alone in considering those numbers to actually be good numbers and, indeed, unworthy of the pressure being placed on Lyon’s place in the team by seemingly all and sundry including Cricket Australia?  Let’s consider for a moment the records of the other spinners presently playing test match cricket and see how the record of Lyon compares (the qualification make for this exercise is 20 wickets taken):

Player  Games Wickets Average Economy 

Swann  52        261       28.69      2.91 

Singh   44         175       35.79      2.86 

Herath  35         165      28.48      2.71 

Ajmal    26         133      27.6        2.66 

Ohja     22         102      31.78      2.68 

Ashwin 16          92       28.53      2.89 

Patel     18         49        49.02     3.22 

Vettori   39        131       34.66     2.45 

Panesar 35       122       33.8       2.71 

Mendis   17        64       34.2        3.08

Looking at this numbers now and comparing those of Nathan Lyon to them is all of the angst about his place in the Australian team and, indeed, the pressure being exerted by Ahmed’s selection really warranted?  His performances and statistics are all the more admirable give that he plays the bulk of his matches in Australian on less than friendly pitches, he rarely has the support of a second spinner and he has been, it must be conceded, poorly captained by captains who are themselves seemingly remembering the days of Warne.
Despite those impediments he is still tracking to have similar numbers at similar times as players of the stature of Singh, Vettori, Herath or Panesar.  I am more than a bit certain that Cricket Australia and cricket supporters of the Australian team would happily accept any of those players in the current lineup.  So, at the risk of becoming repetitious but still restating the question, what is the problem with relying on N Lyon? 
The answer to this question gets on back to an examination of the question posed in the title to this post:

Why is finding a good spinner for the Australian team so hard?

It must be clear from what has gone above that that question is unfair stated or, in fact, redundant because Australia already has a good spinner in Nathan Lyon.  The problem is that the Australian public, pundits and, possibly, players are NOT looking for a good spinner.  Rather they are looking for an answer to this question: 

Why is it so hard to find the next Shane Warne?  

That is a question that can simply must be answered this way: we will never find a spinner like Shane Warne again.  Therein lies the rub: we, the Australian cricket public, pundits and players, are searching for something we can not and will not ever have again.   Until we as a cricketing nation can get our heads around that immutable truth we are going to continue to “burn” our clearly good spinners with the pressure that comes with expectation.  Surely now it is time to get behind Nathan Lyon and back him to get the job done because, simply put, we already have a good spinner in him. 

The Ashes: Ryan Harris injured? Calm down everybody!

April 27, 2013 By in Shumpty Speaks Tags: , , , Leave a comment

Fans of the Australian cricket team awoke to the news on Thursday that Ryan Harris was returning home from the IPL due to an achilles heel injury. Actually, scratch that, on Thursday the news about Ryan Harris went something like this:

* Ryan Harris is injured.
* He is returning home 1 day after he was named in the Australian Ashes squad.
* He is out of the Ashes series.
* Yet again the Cricket Australia board of selectors have stuffed up.

Unfortunately for journalists of print, web and social media only one of those four “facts” were correct. As we found out AFTER the idiotic headlines (kudos to the Courier Mail for the picture of Harris with his head in his hands wearing a Queensland cap lamenting him being out of the Ashes campaign):

* Ryan Harris has an injury to his achilles heel.
* He left India on Tuesday; viz., one day in advance of the naming of the Australian Ashes squad.
* He is expected to be fit, in his words, in “a couple of weeks” OR, in the words of Cricket Australia, in six weeks. Neither timeline put him out of the Ashes squad.
* He was selected by Cricket Australia in the full knowledge of him returning home. Indeed he has returned home so that his injury can be managed by Cricket Australia doctors.

Now I know that:

* I have been a very harsh critic of the Cricket Australia selection panel and in particular John Inverarity; and
* We are all very excited about the forthcoming series: well one part excited and nine parts worried

BUT can everyone just calm down for a minute? I fully understand the social media explosion that goes with something like this happening: indeed on other occasions I have been stoking the fire. However, for the print media to beat this up the way they have smacks of another agenda or, at the very least, an attempt at expectation management of Australian fans (in the expectation of a comprehensive loss).

It seems that the print media in this country has already written this team off: having pillored Cricket Australia for the team they selected for India with the benefit of the hindsight of a 4-0 result (the same print media were very enamoured with the team before it departed these shores as I remember it) said media are now pilloring a team that has been selected seemingly solely with an eye on winning. Such writing is reminiscent of that of the English press when Australia were belting the Poms in ’89 and ’93. I never expected it from our press.

Am I missing something completely here? Cricket Australia have picked a team that is experienced in the conditions and, in my opinion, can win the Ashes. The Poms are cocky and think we are crap. What better time to get behind our team and bask in the glory of beating them? The reporting of the naming of the team and that of Ryan Harris’ injury suggests another agenda: I for one hope that changes sooner rather than later so that we can focus on getting our urn back!