After going down 2-0 in the 2013 Ashes series against England, Australia have numerous questions that they have to answer if they want to get back to the top of Test cricket rankings.
It mostly concerns the batting, but there are also a couple of side issues related to this.
Firstly, Glenn McGrath’s suggestion that 19-year-old Ashton Agar should be axed from the team is just absurd.
Agar is the youngest member of this cricket team, and he has been trying his best, and was very close to making his Test debut in the previous series against India.
Instead, Agar has been thrown into a situation where he doesn’t even know about the hierarchy of the team, which makes it tough for him to perform as at this age a player needs constant guidance.
However, it doesn’t mean Agar is a bad cricketer. He is as good a spinner, if not better, than both Nathan Lyon and Fawad Ahmed. He is definitely a far superior batsman than both Lyon and Fawad.
But with McGrath saying this straight out says that he is willing to throw bowlers ‘under the bus’, but keep faith with struggling batsman, like Shane Watson, who keep making fundamental mistakes shows a distinct lack of judgment from a man who has taken 563 wickets in 124 Test matches for Australia.
Sky Sports commentator and West Indies legend Michael Holding said on one of the days during the second Test that the batsman basically get the rub of green, while the bowlers get thrown ‘under the bus’.
Glenn McGrath, on the other hand, has shown that he is keen to deliver throwaway lines which disrupt the model of the smart cricketer that he became.
McGrath should remember that his partner in success, Shane Warne, had a tough start to his career and yet turned out to be one of the greatest cricketers in history.
This is how Australia should line-up against England for the first Test of the second Ashes series, at home in Australia, in Brisbane.
There are number of spots with more than two options and it also includes a lot of newcomers.
Team line-up for first Test match should be:
1. Jordan Silk
2. Phillip Hughes
3. Usman Khawaja
4. Michael Clarke (c)
5. and 6. options: Steve Smith, James Faulkner, Ben Cutting, Moises Henriques
7. Between: Brad Haddin and Matthew Wade (wk)
8. Ashton Agar
9, 10 and 11. Options: Jackson Bird, Ryan Harris, James Pattinson, Peter Siddle, Mitchell Starc, Chadd Sayers, Nathan Coulter-Nile, Mitchell Johnson, Clint McKay, Mitchell Marsh, Pat Cummins, Josh Hazlewood, Gurinder Sandhu.
What do you think?
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