The start of Australia’s tour of Sri Lanka is not going too well. Early Tuesday morning saw Australia lose the second and final T20 match by eight runs.
In many ways though, this performance was worse than the one we turned in at the first T20, where we lost by 35 runs, simply because it showed that we had learned absolutely nothing.
Outside of Shane Watson, the batting was woeful. It was shocking to see how dumbfounded Australia’s top-order was by the Sri Lankan spin.
You could see how frustrated Cameron White was getting, when he was unable to pick which way the ball was spinning and the less talked about Shaun Marsh’s dismissal, the better.
However, Australia’s T20 batting line-up shares some but not many players to the ODI side and even less so to the Test side, so it’s hard to fully judge Australia’s – as a whole – ability to play spin off the two T20 matches, nor is it fair to criticise the T20 side for not learning how to play spin and adapt to the conditions just two days apart.
Simply put, those are T20 batting selection problems that should probably be looked at in the future, but they aren’t however the issue of this piece.
My main issue with Australia’s performance has been with their bowlers and the whole approach by the Australian unit (players, selectors, coaches and the other support staff) to the spinning Sri Lankan pitches.
In the first match, Australia was dispatched to all areas of the park by the Sri Lankan batsmen. Why? Because they entered with a three-pronged pace attack, one spinner and a couple of part-timers.
So what did they do for the second match? They went in unchanged, and outside of a bounce back from John Hastings, were hammered again.
If this was just Australia failing to learn from one T20 match, it would be one thing, but Australia adopted this exact same approach to the entire ODI World Cup at the start of this year.
That tournament clearly illustrated that the only tool Australia had in their tool belt was a hammer and when they realised they couldn’t simply pound their opponents into submission on pitches that required finesse, they were already bounced out of the tournament.
That’s not even the most worrying part about all this.
The part that worries me the most is that one of the two spinners we picked for the Test portion of this tour, Nathan Lyon, earned his spot in that team with his success at T20 level here in Australia.
The talk before this tour has been all about how Australia will deal with the spinning pitches of Sri Lanka. So why then do you not put Nathan Lyon in the T20 side, when that’s the place where he earned his stripes and is his most comfortable?
Wouldn’t it be a good idea to give the guy, with only four first class matches, an early crack at the Sri Lankan conditions and batsmen before you throw him in the fires of Test cricket?
It’s not like Australia treats T20 with any sort of respect anyway. Why else would the side be captained by a guy who is judged not decent enough to even stay in the country with the ODI squad?
If we’re just going to use T20 as a place to put their underdeveloped youngsters, then go all out and use it as a developmental tool for your under-cooked Test players that are actually staying on the tour.
Hell, even throw Michael Beer in there too. While a veteran compared to Lyon, the guy still only has 13 first class matches.
This focus on pace in the T20s just baffles me and is frankly worrying; especially for the Test portion of the tour. No Beer and no Lyon for the ODIs also means that come Test matches, Australia have the option of two spinners who have no idea about the conditions and have a total of one Test match between them.
It looks to me that Cricket Australia is just going to throw them against the wall and hope one of them sticks. If one does then they are geniuses, if they don’t they can chalk it up to rebuilding.
While the T20 portion of the tour is over, the worst case scenario is that the Australian unit will only look at the margin of Tuesday’s loss compared to the first match and believe they are on the right track.
If they do that then it is going to be one hell of a long tour.
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