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Former firebrand Jeff Thomson is right on the money: Australian fast bowlers need to bowl more, not be wrapped in cotton wool by rotation.
With all due respect to the “back-room boys” who trust logarithms, or any other theory that defies description, good old fashioned hard work wins every time.
The fast bowler stresses his body, no argument.
But if it’s a well-oiled machine, it must be tuned, and that’s by bowling, not by watching television on rostered days off.
The more time off, the harder it is to get back the rhythm. And if the rhythm is missing, the stress hits the out-of-nick back, hip, hamstrings, or feet.
And you don’t have to be a rocket scientist to work that out.
Sure, the paceman’s current injury count is horrendous, with Pat Cummins (heel), Ryan Harris (hip), Mitchell Johnson (toe surgery), Ben Cutting (side strain) with Doug Bollinger and Shane Watson suffering from hamstrings.
Johnson could be out for a year, Cummins for six months, the other four are liabilities with questions marks over whether they’d last any game they start.
Carnage.
What Thomson suggests is the answer, and it starts in the nets where practice makes perfect.
And that includes not bowling no-balls by a metre.
Fast bowlers should be a spent force by the end of the session. In Thomson’s era, that was the case, then hit the bar for a goodly few beers.
There was no warm-down, nor time in the gym, nor diet control.
Just bowl your heart out and live into the night with a couple of hot dogs on the run, and do it all again the next day: a pretty simple formula.
And rarely did the quicks break down. The legendary Dennis Lillee was an exception, with stress fractures of the spine in 1973 against Pakistan at the SCG.
In one of the most courageous bowling performances, Lillee came off two days in traction to bowl 23 consecutive overs and take 3-68 to beat Pakistan by 52 runs. Superb.
But it was a flaw in Lillee’s action that caused the stress fractures, not overwork. Once that was overcome, Lillee went on to become the world’s leading wicket-taker with 355, erasing Lance Gibbs’ 309 from the record books.
Thomson cracked his bowling collarbone in Adelaide, also against Pakistan, in 1976. But it was a heavy collision with team-mate Alan Turner during a disastrous caught-and-bowled mix-up that caused the incident, not overwork.
Brett Lee was the first of the current Test quicks to suffer on-going injuries. Now it’s a procession.
And it’s got as much to do with closeting the side, making them a closely-knit family with little other interests than each other.
How boring and unhealthy. Get out in the real world, and live a little, broaden the mind. Think of other things rather than cricket, cricket, cricket.
Then do as Jeffrey Robert Thomson suggests: more work, less cotton-wool.