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Ian Chappell, the best of the Channel 9 commentary team in my view, made the point as India was collapsing like a flimsy building in an earthquake in its second inning at the MCG that a team like Australia can re-build more quickly when it has a strong fast bowling attack.
As Chappell was making this point, the bowling attack of Ben Hilfenhaus, James Pattinson (Man of the Match?) and Peter Siddle (the real Man of the Match) was ripping through the strong (on paper, at least) Indian batting lineup.
Good players like Gambhir and great players like Rahul Dravid and VVS Laxman were just blasted away by the fire power of the fast bowling attack.
And it was an attack. There was very little negative bowling. Virtually every ball was bowled with the malice of taking a wicket. The ball was pitched up inviting the drive – and the mistake, as the ‘Little Master’, Sachin Tendulkar, found out to his cost.
What a change from a couple of years ago when the Australian bowling attack couldn’t take 20 wickets in a Test, even if they’d been given several weeks to do so. In this Test, Australia bowled 141 overs to the 180 or so by India. The bowlers took 20 wickets with a strike rate of a wicket every seven overs. This is an outstanding achievement.
A great deal of credit has been given to the new fearsomeness and efficiency of the Australian fast bowling attack has been given to the new bowling coach, Craig McDermott. He has insisted on the bowlers bowling a fuller length rather than banging the ball into the pitch in the hope of forcing a mistake.
By bowling fuller, the bowlers gave the ball more length in which to swing. And in the modern game, with all the protections available to batsmen, it is the fuller ball that forces mistakes rather than the shorter ball.
The strategy was so successful for all three fast bowlers that all of them had claims to the Man of the Match Award.
The question must be raised: why has it taken McDermott’s arrival on the coaching panel for this strategy to be employed?
Now the team needs some sage advice from the batting coach to get a better result from the team’s batsmen. At one stage in the second innings Australia was 4 for 27 and on the brink of a total, match-losing collapse.
Significantly, old hands Ricky Ponting and Michael Hussey rescued the team. Hussey and Ponting were lucky that the DRS was not available because Hussey was actually ‘dismissed’ three times without being given out, and Ponting was ‘dismissed’ once when he was 15.
By putting the senior batsmen through a batting camp where a two-piece ball was used to get the players used to the extravagant swing that the Indian bowlers sometimes achieve, the new coach Mickey Arthur was establishing (I believe) his credentials to fix up his team’s batting problems. If he can help eliminate the now almost customary collapses, Arthur will make Justin Langer’s position as batting coach redundant.
Aside from the admirable bowling by the fast bowlers, the main feature of Australia’s performance was the brilliant captaincy of Michael Clarke. Clarke had his critics before his appointment.
The criticism, to be fair, was mainly directed at his Generation-Y lifestyle. But he is emerging as a fine attacking captain in the tradition of Richie Benaud, Ian Chappell and Mark Taylor.
When Tendulkar looked like smashing the bowlers out of the game in the second innings, Clarke had a long conversation with Pattinson and got him to bowl full on Tendulkar’s fourth and fifth-stump line. The ploy worked. The great batsman immediately looked human, even mortal.
Then Pattinson was taken off and Siddle was brought on. His first ball, on the fourth-stump line, saw Tendulkar pushing forward and getting a nick which was snaffled by Hussey in the gully.
Clarke also is not afraid to bring on his spinner Nathan Lyon, especially at the tail-enders. Lyon got hit for a few boundaries before David Warner took a brilliant catch on the boundary to end India’s second inning.
Before the Test the Australian side had a transitional look about it. There were the three tyros at the top of the order and two veterans in the middle, the return of a journeyman bowler who had struggled badly in the Ashes series and a keeper who no longer scores important runs.
The tyros are still in a transitional phase, even though Ed Cowan’s 68 was the 10th best score by an Australian opener in his first innings in a Test.
When – probably sometime well into next year – Shane Watson returns, a decision might have to be made about whether to leave him at opening or to bat him either at four (Ponting’s position) or six (replacing Hussey).
I think that for the balance of the side, Watson needs to bat down the order so that he can be the fourth medium/fast bowler.
This leaves the opening positions and number three to be worked out. Time, and how the tyros perform, will provide the answers here in due course.
As for the keeping question, I think it is now a waiting game for Tim Paine’s finger to heal properly before he takes over as Brad Haddin’s successor.
By the time the next Ashes series comes around the Australian side will be different from the side that played so splendidly at the MCG this week. But the heart of the side will be there.
There is a group of fast bowlers now who can take wickets in Tests, at last. And there is a captain, again at last, who knows how to use a good fast bowling attack to force a strong batting side into a rout.