Time to call stumps on Cricket Australia's rotation policy

We better start rotating the batsman, if you score successive hundreds you better have a rest. Clarkey would'nt be playing much cricket.

Glenn, I am one of those 70's all rounders. If I wasnt on the field and didnt have the ball in my hand I wasn't going to get wickets, let alone giving the other quicks a chance to get my poles. Workload, what crap, pain, injury, severe discomfort, MANDATORY! We bowled in the nets for hours, ran the roads to get strong, 6 overs was a short spell, blood in your boots was an expectation, not an issue. This lot are soft and over pampered. Rotation, thats what we did on the dance floor. Cheers, David Colley (257).

Thanks heaps Glenn for these insightful figures. This is not rocket science, surely you always put your best team on the park!

Oh and I forgot Pattinson

Agree Glenn re: Test cricket is priority - our main fast bowlers (test bowlers) shouldn't be included in the 20/20 format.

Fantastic writeup Glenn!! and about time someone stated some clear facts. Some great opinions written here and makes for very good reading. I don't agree with the rotation policy whatsoever. Fast bowlers know there bodies better than anyone (obviously) - it's time they put the decision making back to the individual and let each fast bowler decide if they're fit to play or not. They don't get paid to sit on the couch watching. They're professional sportsman who want to play for there country. All this analising of bowlers work loads is absolute crap. Get back to the basics - bowler runs in, bowls - it's not complicated yet all this university garbage has made it that way. Go and find another sport to stuff up and leave cricket to how it should be played - hard

I really don't know whether the rotation policy is sound management practice for the overall benefit of the test team. One thing with which you can't argue is that the decision to rotate bowlers has given us enormous bowling depth. I use the recent example of Mitch Johnson's selection at Perth which was in place of the rested Siddle and/or Hilfenhaus. But for the rotation policy he would not have been selected in Perth, or Melbourne (Starc) and perhaps Sydney. Was his selection and Man of the Match performance in Melbourne not a good one? I would say so. Let me further illustrate my point by listing the current crop of test-standard fast bowlers in Australia, albeit some of them injured; Starc, Johnson, Siddle, Hilfenhaus, Harris, Bollinger, Bird, Hastings and Cummins. I could even add Cutting and Hazelwood to that list too having both been 12th man in the past 12 or so months. Is this sort of bowling depth healthy? I think the selectors ought to be praised for having such enormous depth.

Thanks for sharing your thoughts Glenn. I'm reminded of my dad's advice (from the ark age); when a capable player had a good day with the bat, throw 'em the ball. The theory was about being "in the zone" or whatever modern spin you want to give it ... form takes practise and opportunity. Rest schmest.

By your last paragraph, wouldn't the logic also be that young player would "harden up" by bowling more?

Well I would say that bowling cold for 17 deliveries per day would be worse than bowling warmed up for two six over spells per day

Of course the converse is true. What if was not rotated turned into a Reid / Harris and took only 100 wickets?

To be fair, MJ's career in ODI is actually more impressive than his test stats. When batsmen have to play at his wide of off stump line he is difficult. When they can leave them all day until he tries to change his line is when he gets thumped everywhere. Yorker outsdie off stump tailing away is about the hardest ball to hit if the square and cover boundaries are well covered.

Agreed, if you list the bowlers of the past, you need to add in those, like Bruce Reid, who were regularly injured and bowled nowhere near this number of balls. Otherwsie you are cherry picking data to support your view, rather than collecting the data and using it to come to an objective decision. So with that in mind, I'm going to completely ignore my own advice and deliver opinion backed by nothing at all.... I think the lack of a proper off season has a large part to play. Very few other sports have no period of rest and recuperation. I also wonder if the endurance requirements of test matches and the fast twitch cold to hot of 4 overs in twenty twenty cause problems. Basically no one knows ... but CA get a lot of money to know, so hopefully they are getting closer to an answer.

It's a combination of bowling and gym work. You can't simply discount the gym work, which is also what got D K Lillee back on track after his back stress fractures early in his career. And by gym work, I don't mean My Universe weightlifting, I mean the core strength and flexibility training they need.

I think it is always good to maintain conversations around the data as it appears that there is a lot of emotion being passed off as accurate argument. It is also good to see a journalist actually do some research other than just start bush fires. Although I must say i am in Benno's camp on this on not only the interpretation of the numbers but on some of the data selected. I am immediately suspicious when we are having an argument around Australian fast bowlers and the initial data list contains only one Australian fast bowler. There is no doubt Graham Mckenzie was a champion but he retired over 40 years ago, the sheduling of one-day, T20 and Test cricket has changed over that time . Why haven't you given more recent data (at least since the advent of World Series cricket) on the subsequent champions (Lillee, Thompson, Lawson, McDermott, Reid to name a few) as the baseline data, I don't know what their data was but my suspicion because of their exclusion is that they weren't as impressive. Certainly the numbers of recent bowlers McGrath and Kasper fit in quite well with the original list. The comparison of end of career numbers to Siddle's and Johnson's mid to late career numbers is a phurphy the comparison needs to be at the same stages of the career to make any sense. . Also the bowling numbers alone are not enough information to make any sort of informed decision as injury is also a key. It is easy to luxuriate in the strength of a fast bowler bowling 400 balls in a match as Lawson did in a match against NZ in Novemeber 1985 (we lost) and then miss three series due to injury.

Ok I'm going to shut up now, but it seems there's a bit of a consensus forming that better scheduling is what is needed to reduce the fast bowling injuries. That seems fair enough to me. Course, since no national cricketing body is going to reduce the number of matches and therefore dollars earned, it would make sense for the managers to use some kind of strategy to reduce the load on the players over the summer, particularly the fast bowlers. What would we call such a strategy? A resting strategy? A management strategy? ;-)

Swampy, No I'm not a sports scientist. But I am a scientist and analysing data to reveal complicated patterns that aren't apparent at first glance is a major part of what I do and the papers I publish. Please understand that I have no interest or care for "the theory" as you keep calling it. It's data that can be informative if we use it properly. My job has given me an understanding of how to use data properly and how data can be misused. And showing a few examples of bowlers who bowled more deliveries in the past is only one half of the story, and examining only that half of it is misleading. You're deceiving yourself by comparing today's bowlers only to the highest numbers in history. THat's not comparing like with like and that's been my point. No one will likely ever bowl that much again, not even Mcgrath did. Let's look at the numbers for Johnson against our recent players... Johnson is on track to bowl as many balls as Mcgrath and Gillespie given the number of matches he's played. That means he's bowling the same amount per match. Johnson has played half as many matches and he's bowled about half as many balls. He's got another six years of bowling to reach Mcgrath's retirement age so who knows how far he'll get. He'll very likely exceed the number of balls bowled by Bichel and possibly Lee. So compared to our recent legends, he's actually doing alright. Consensus based on experience is one thing, and certainly valuable, but properly collected and correctly analysed data is much more so. But it has to be done right to be of value.

Interesting. I guess it's not surprising that it would be a U shaped curve and presumably it shifts in location as a bowler progresses through their career.

Glenn, Absolutely there is clearly something up given the current high injury load. And yes it does seem counter productive to stop a bloke from bowling after 17 balls each day, when he's working on his technique. And yes, you only get fit for bowling by bowling makes a lot of sense and is probably bang on. And yes that would be worthy of some kind of experiment to figure it out. But there also seems to be clear evidence that overuse injuries are a problem and they would seem to me to be a problem that can be managed quite easily - by reducing the load. Whether that's the real cause or not I don't know but we won't know if we won't try. And if you're going to use data to guide your decisions you've got to use it and follow the plans for the long run; that's been my argument. I actually don't know how long the rotation policy has been in full swing, I thought it was only fairly recent. But rotation aside, if a scientific approach to bowling management has been going since 2002, then a single spate of injuries to very young bowlers in 2011/2012 doesn't suggest to me that it's rubbish at all. I'd say quite the opposite. Ten years of reasonable success. Regarding the injuries to new bowlers, I actually wonder if it's more to do with lifestyle and work before cricket than bowling load. The natural strength a person gets from hard physical work is unlike anything else. Shake a young farmer's hand or a young builder's hand and you know they've worked a solid day every day of their lives. I suspect that type of young life gives an overall body strength that would stand up better to the rigours of fast bowling. I really don't know but throwing hay bails around, fixing fences and wrestling cattle gives you a certain physical toughness that gym work or bowling in the nets can't give. It's the Os du Randt vs Al Baxter idea. I imagine the Australian bowlers of yesteryear were more likely to have worked a physical job before increasing their bowling load which would have braced them well for the demands.

As I said in an earlier thread, with the rotation policy in place we should at least go back to the SCG test starting on 2 January.