It could not be more obvious that Australia must play the Indian spinners well if they are to have any chance of doing well in India.
Australia’s record of just one Test win in Asia for nearly a decade underlines just how badly Australia have struggled in conditions which help spinners.
Australia don’t control what the pitches are likely to be or the quality of India spinners, but there is a spin trap that Australia do have control over, and one which they must avoid. Australia must play their best bowlers in India.
Most teams when they visit India, almost feel obliged to field a spin heavy attack, even if the spinners are not good enough to play at the Test level. Teams forget that Indian batsmen are very good players of spin, and it will take a very good spinner to be truly effective against the Indian batting order.
Consequently, the spinners prove ineffective and the bowlers who are potentially better equipped to get the Indian batsmen out, find themselves on the sidelines.
This was evident in the two most recent series that India have hosted.
First the touring Kiwi side couldn’t find a spot for Tim Southee in their playing XI in any of the three Tests they played, relying instead on spinners like Mark Craig and Jeetan Patel. Neither Craig nor Patel have the calibre to be Test bowlers, and didn’t really Test the Indian batsmen.
This is not to say that Southee would necessarily have run through the Indian batting line up, but he would have had a better chance of doing it.
When touring sides play spinners just because it is India, they forget to take into account the quality of India’s batting against spin and also the quality of those spinners. Just because the pitches are likely to help spinners, doesn’t mean that any and every spinner will be effective and do the job for you.
Even the best of spinners like Shane Warne and Murali have traditionally struggled against India, and it was a bit too much to expect Patel and Craig to buck that trend.
If a spinner is good, he could potentially do well, as Graeme Swann showed in 2012 series where he helped England win a series in India. However, the belief that just any spinner will do the trick, is just a recipe for failure, as the Kiwis found out.
England then arrived in India, not having learnt any lessons from the Blackcaps, and were so obsessed with the idea of playing spinners that they chose to field Gareth Batty, Zafar Ansari and Liam Dawson during the Tests, with the likes of Steve Finn, Chris Woakes and even Jimmy Anderson taking turns sitting on the sidelines to make way for these spinners.
Is there an ICC law that obligates teams touring India to field at least a fixed number of spinners, or the captain will be fined? It is the only possible explanation for this seeming weird insistence on playing essentially club level spinners ahead of much better and proven Test bowlers.
Batty was never a Test level spinner, and the likes of Ansari and Dawson are barely good enough to trouble county cricket batsmen, how were they expected to be effective against the Indian batting line-up?
As expected playing bowlers, just because they were spinners, and ignoring that they were just not good enough for the Test level, didn’t work.
Australia’s tactics while selecting the playing XI must simply be to go in with their best bowlers, and if one of them happens to be a spinner, then great. When Australia last won a series in India, it was not on the back of Warne’s performance but rather it was Jason Gillespie who led the way finishing as the top wicket-taker for Australia, well ahead of Warne.
A top bowler is a top bowler anywhere, and in the past, James Anderson and Dale Steyn have returned from a Test series in India with a bagful of wickets. It is true that the pitches in India are not conducive to seam bowling, and they weren’t when New Zealand and England toured there recently.
However, it is also true that even on those surfaces, England’s best seamers would have had a much better chance of getting wickets than the club level spinners England (and New Zealand) chose to go with, and in the upcoming series the same holds true for Australia.
The horses for courses approach has rarely if ever, worked for touring teams in India, and Australia must take note of this if they are to put an end to their recent run of disappointing tours to the sub-continent.
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