Play smart, don’t rotate Peter Siddle out of the Adelaide Test

 
Spiro Zavos Columnist

By , 23 Jan 2012 Spiro Zavos is a Roar Expert

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Play smart, don’t rotate Peter Siddle out of the Adelaide Test + enlarge image

Will Peter Siddle be on the sidelines for the Adelaide Test? (AP Photo/Tertius Pickard)

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Here’s the picture: we have Australian fast bowler Peter Siddle, with 17 wickets in three Tests against India, against what is supposedly one of the top five batting line-ups ever.

The powers that be controlling the baggy green want to drop him for the Adelaide Test.

There will be quibbles about my provocative use of the word ‘drop.’ If he isn’t in the starting line-up he won’t be dropped but will be ‘rotated.’

To my mind, we are arguing over a definition here, not the reality. The fact is that if he is left out, even though he is fit and anxious to play, he is effectively dropped. Or to put it another way, he is being left to rotate in the wind.

There is absolutely no case for Siddle or Ben Hilfenhaus (if he becomes a rotation victim) to be left out of the starting XI for Adelaide. All three Tests so far have been concluded within three days. Siddle has not been over-bowled.

And all the evidence is that rather than bowling himself to a standstill in the series, he has become stronger and more effective as the series has progressed.

He has turned himself from a journeyman bowler with great heart, as he was when he came into Test cricket, to a potent threat to all the opposition top order, including Sachin Tendulkar.

Siddle has done this by bowling with plenty of energy and with out-swing complemented with a vicious in-cutter (a delivery that has undone the great Tendulkar several times in the series).

It would be the height of foolishness if Siddle (or Hilfenhaus) is ‘rested’ next week. He is a bowler at the height of his powers. He is itching to get stuck into the Indian top order once more. The experience of tangling with the likes of Tendulkar and Rahul Dravid is the sort of experience that is gold for a bowler who is expected to be a key player in the next Ashes series.

This thought raises another consideration. I sometimes chat about cricket with Rodney Cavalier, the masterful chairman of the SCG Board. A former successful politician (the best Education Minister that New South Wales has had), Cavalier is knowledgeable and articulate on cricket. He expressed his disappointment before the series started that the eagerly awaited Australia-India series was only going to be a four-Test affair.

He is a stickler for the five-Test format when major cricket nations are playing each other. The truncated Test series against South Africa was another example of a Test series that short-changed itself. “The reason why they are called Tests,” he explained to me, “is because they test, or should test, all the cricket resources a national side has. And for these tests to equate to Test cricket, the series should be five-Test affairs.”

Of course, he is right. Moreover, when Australia plays England in the next Ashes series, there will be five Tests. And this brings me back to Siddle and the rotation policy. Given his current form, Siddle is a likely front-line fast bowler in the next Ashes series. It makes sense, therefore, to give him the experience of playing as often as he can in the series leading up to the Ashes.

If he is on song in England during the Ashes series, he will be expected to play and play strongly in all five Tests. Why not help him prepare for this by giving him four Tests on the trot, at least, against India?

The rotation concept is a relatively new one for cricket. It is being led by sports scientists and experts (and occasionally bowling coaches) as being the answer to preventing fast bowlers from breaking down. Part of the policy involves calculating the maximum number of overs a bowler should bowl in a year. That is for experienced bowlers like Siddle. For youngsters in their teens, the policy stipulates a maximum number of overs at practice and in games.

This number for the youngsters and the experienced bowlers is ludicrously low. Moreover, it seems to have led to an epidemic of injuries for fast bowlers, young and old, in recent times.

The experts say this isn’t so. But can they point to another period when so many front-line fast bowlers have been breaking down?

Real bowling experts (as opposed to the scientists) argue that what the fast bowlers (young and old) need is more bowling, rather than less. Richie Benaud, for instance, pointed out in a recent Test broadcast that bowlers in his day would back up from Test play with club cricket and Shield cricket, and that even then it was hard for them to adjust (as Ian Meckiff pointed out to him) to the hard slog of five-day Tests.

Geoff Lawson, too, seemingly a cricket prophet without honour in his own country, has repeatedly argued that bowlers, especially fast bowlers, get fit for bowling long spells in successive Tests by bowling long spells in the other games they play.

I am suspicious about all the gym work that is allocated to bowlers (rather than having them bowl). The gym regime tightens muscles rather than loosens them. It might be good for sports like power lifting, but for aerobic, athletic sports I think that it needs to be kept to a minimum.

The great fast bowlers up to the 1960s and 1970s, and indeed into the recent times (think of the Pakistani and West Indian great fast bowlers) never went close to a gym. They were pretty handy and rarely broke down. And bowlers like Freddie Truman, Ian Botham and Sir Richard Hadlee bowled a 1000 or so overs a season in county cricket and still were formidable Test bowlers.

As an aside, before the 2007 Rugby World Cupn>, the All Blacks took the advice of their sports medicine specialists and took 22 of their players out of the first seven weeks of the Super Rugby season. These players were given an extensive gym program specially designed by the specialists. When the players were tested at the end of the program, the coach Graham Henry claimed they were all ‘super-athletes’ with personal bests in every category that was tested.

The players were then carefully rotated in the Test leading up to the Rugby World Cup tournament. It is history now that Henry’s super-athletes were bundled out of the tournament in the quarter-final, the first and so far only time the All Blacks have suffered this indignity. Moreover, player after player became injured in the tournament, including the seemingly indestructible Jerry Collins – a rugby equivalent of Siddle.

The moral from this, and it applies to cricket as much as it does to rugby, is that the best way to get fit to play to your best capacity is to play hard and often.

So back to the Australian side for the Adelaide Test. I want the selectors to go for a fast bowling attack of Peter Siddle, Ryan Harris and Ben Hilfenhaus, with Nathan Lyon to do the off-spinning.

The rotation policy should be scrapped (or just quietly shelved) and the traditional policy that has served Australian cricket so well for 130 years or so of picking the strongest available side should be re-instated.

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