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I know what you’re thinking. You’re thinking this will be a call to keep Shane Watson in the Test team. Reassure yourself on this point: Watson should not be in the Test team.
He cannot be in the Test team. Keeping him in the Test team would be a misstep on a scale somewhere between Nasser Hussain putting Australia in to bat in Brisbane in 2002, and the Vietnam War.
The reason a defence of Shane Watson is needed is not because he deserves to retain his place – which as we’ve established, would just be a colossal mistake – but because, for all his faults, he is not the reason Australia is behind in the Ashes.
Having him in the team isn’t what lost the first Test, and dropping him isn’t what will win the second.
Shane Watson is a man who has lived his life under a terrible curse. He was granted the gift of gorgeous textbook technique, but denied the ability to cause that technique to properly coincide with a ball moving towards him. Every shot he plays looks magnificent assuming you weren’t expecting him to hit anything.
But the point I want to make is: this is out of his control. In Cardiff, Watson was out twice the same way he’s been out umpteen times before: trapped lbw to fast bowlers using the cunning and subtle plan of bowling at the stumps. He knows he’s been out that way many times: he knew the bowlers were trying to get him out that way again.
He couldn’t do anything about it. That is his tragedy.
For whatever reason, Watson is, at this late stage in his career, simply incapable of not getting out to straight balls. At least to straight red balls – throughout his career the weaknesses that plague him have seemed to lose much of their power when facing a white ball, but such are the mysteries of cricket – maybe coloured pads are easier to play around the front of.
The fact remains, Watson’s fall in Cardiff was out of his control. He just couldn’t do any better than he did.
On the other hand, we know that Steve Smith is capable of not madly charging down the wicket before he knows where the ball is going. And we know that when he sees the ball zooming down the legside, he’s capable of padding it away without waggling his bat feebly at it. We know he’s better than that.
We know Adam Voges, for all his inexperience at Test level, is a 35-year-old man with over a decade’s first-class cricket behind him, and that he is certainly capable, having played calmly and serenely for nearly two hours, and with the safety of stumps in sight, of not flailing idiotically at an innocuous half-volley and scooping it straight to cover.
We know that Michael Clarke is capable of resisting the temptation to waft weakly at a wide one and providing backward point with a catch as easy as it was alliterative.
We know that Brad Haddin, even if of an advanced age where taking crucial catches that may determine the course of the match are beyond him, is capable of not slogging recklessly just when true grit is required.
What I’m saying is, in being dismissed twice through nothing more than his own inability to hit the ball, Watson may have been the least culpable of all Australia’s batsmen in the first Test. He was, at least, playing only within his own limitations, rather than deliberately making himself less competent than he really is.
He also fought hard. He stayed in the middle for longer during the Test than Clarke, Smith or Voges managed, and was clearly desperately focused on combating the English line of attack. That he couldn’t is no more his fault than it was Glenn McGrath’s fault he never hit a double century. You can ask a man to give of his best, but you can’t ask him to give of what he does not possess.
Yes, Watson has to go, and in all likelihood he will. And like the end of any career, it’s a sad moment in time.
Few players have been more criticised, yet for all his failures, he had his successes too, and there were days on which those textbook shots connected with thunderous power and he clouted bowlers of all sorts far and wide. As he grew older, those days became fewer and farther between, and the ability to veil his vulnerabilities diminished to the point we are at now.
His time has come as it does to all, and as it may to a few more before this series is out.
But let the record show that the reason Watson must be dropped is the same reason that Watson should not be blamed – Australia was the architect of its own destruction in Cardiff, but Watto did not collaborate on the blueprints.
I am sorry to see you go, Shane, even if I’m glad you’re going.