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Can Australia compete in the next three Tests? Should Lyon replace Agar? Can the Aussie batsmen follow Khawaja’s lead? How much worse can the umpiring get in this series?
» Relive Australia’s second innings, all out for 235, chasing 583.
Can the Aussie batsmen emulate Usman Khawaja?
The new first drop’s dismissal in the first innings was a microcosm of everything disturbing about Australia’s batting. It embodied impatience, carelessness and ineptitude.
In the wake of Australia’s comical collapse, English greenhorn Joe Root spent day three laying down a blueprint for how the Australians should behave at the crease.
Unfortunately, Khawaja appears to be the only one who was taking notes.
Similar to Root, Australia’s new first drop endured a torrid time early in his innings yesterday as fresh bowlers buoyed by early wickets assaulted him relentlessly.
Just like his English counterpart, the newly minted Queenslander braved this arduous session before unfurling expansive strokes once set at the crease.
It is a batting strategy as old as cricket itself but one at which most of the Aussies turn up their noses.
Khawaja crept to 7 from 39 balls as he came to terms with the bowling. Confident he had sufficiently assessed the conditions and his opponents, he then shifted gears, cracking several trademark pull shots as he added 29 runs in the space of 25 balls.
The sole conspicuous flaw in Khawaja’s approach was his lack of urgency against spin.
That is not to suggest that he should have tried to flay Graeme Swann and Root. Rather I would suggest he closely examines the manner in which his skipper combats tweakers.
The word which best seems to illustrate Michael Clarke’s play against spin is ‘busy’. He does not allow spinners the comfort of settling onto a length and repeating the same delivery six balls in a row.
Clarke continually skips down the pitch to the slow bowlers but rarely as a means to slap them over the infield.
More often he lashes the ball along the turf down the ground or, if the delivery is too challenging to be dispatched, he treats it with the due respect offered by a dead bat.
Khawaja may not be comfortable in replicating Clarke’s nimble style. But he does need to develop his own method of unsettling spinners.
There were hints yesterday of the tactic which may prove most fruitful for Khawaja when facing spin. On occasion he shuffled deep into his crease to either carve the ball through point or clip it through square leg.
By using the full depth of the crease he was able to turn length deliveries into near-long hops.
It is an indication of how dire Australia’s batting has been when an innings of 54 is the most substantial reason for hope. But it was genuinely encouraging to finally witness an Australian batsman shelve his ego in favour of occupying the crease and grafting for a score.
Should Nathan Lyon take Ashton Agar’s place?
No matter how captivating and beguiling his debut, teenage tweaker Agar has been a profound failure in the role he was selected to fulfil.
Acting on intuition that the precocious West Australian would flourish at Test level, or perhaps a more calculated belief he may help quell Kevin Pietersen, the Aussie selectors thrust Agar into the blinding pressure of a lopsided Ashes contest.
There is compelling evidence he has the aptitude and temperament required of a Test cricketer.
But he needs time. Time to develop his variations, time to concoct crafty strategies, time to build unerring trust in his competence, time to experience the depths and heights of first-class cricket.
Australia do not possess a mesmerising, marauding, match-winning spinner of the ilk of Swann.
They do, however, have a solid exponent of the craft who has endured the fiercest challenges the sport has to offer and come out of that a more effective, more composed and more cunning bowler. His name is Nathan Lyon.
Far more accomplished spinners than he have completed a Test tour of India with figures considerably less heartening than the 15 wickets at an average of 37 he collected in his last series for Australia.
Vaporised by a rampant MS Dhoni in the opening match of that series, Lyon was promptly dropped for the first time in his two-year career.
Rather than dwell on the pain of this setback, he worked assiduously in the nets, earned a recall and snared nine wickets in the final Test.
Lyon dislodged noted players of spin Sachin Tendulkar and Virat Kohli twice in that match as he adeptly implemented a fresh stratagem of trapping them LBW from around the wicket.
The passion, resilience, maturity and intellect Lyon showed in designing his comeback are precisely the attributes missing from the Aussie line-up.
He is one of the few Australian players who have consistently displayed a searing desire to do justice to their baggy green cap.
At just 25 years old, the South Australian is still a pup in spin terms. Most tweakers don’t reach their peak until their late 20s.
In fact, Swann had to wait until he was 29 just to make his Test debut, while the world’s best spinner Saaed Ajmal was 31 when he first played Test cricket for Pakistan.
Agar won’t suffer from being dropped. Quite the opposite – he will benefit from the experience of performing on cricket’s grandest platform and being made redundant by gifted and canny opponents.
How much worse can the umpiring get?
Farcical is the only way to accurately describe the umpiring so far in this series.
It is unfortunate, because it detracted from a phenomenal contest in the first match and may now take away from a commanding English performance in this Test.
Similar to the dumfounding decision to deem unfair a clear catch claimed by Steve Smith on day three, yesterday’s DRS-induced dismissal of Agar left the TV commentators astonished.
David Lloyd and Michael Holding were vociferous in their condemnation of the third umpire’s decision to adjudge Agar caught behind on review.
The replay was inconclusive as to whether the delivery from Tim Bresnan had kissed the edge of Agar’s bat. But the evidence from Hot Spot was emphatic – there was not the merest smudge visible on his blade.
Despite the lack of either an obvious deflection or a mark on HotSpot, the third umpire deemed a faint clicking noise as the ball passed the bat to be sufficient evidence of Agar’s dismissal.
Michael Holding was so incensed and perplexed by the call he sarcastically mused that Agar may have been adjudged lbw.
Former English keeper Alec Stewart, Australian champion Shane Warne and ex-Sri Lanka coach Tom Moody immediately took to Twitter to criticise the decision.
Twice in as many days Australia have been pick-pocketed by the third umpire. Fortuitously, neither incorrect decision has had any meaningful impact on the result.
Is there any hope of Australia competing over the next three Tests?
The Aussies may feel that, considering the success their quicks, led by Peter Siddle, have had against England’s batting guns, they need only post solid totals themselves to challenge robustly from here on.
They have suppressed Alastair Cook, Jonathan Trott, Kevin Pietersen and Matt Prior.
Regrettably for Australia, players of such ilk rarely have extended form slumps. Should even two of that quartet fire in the next Test it could amount to apocalyptic carnage.
The only way Australia can avoid being surgically dismembered over this series is if their skipper fires up.
Nothing shy of Herculean feats from the masterful strokemaker will narrow the current chasm between the sides.