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After nearly pulling of a dramatic win in the first Ashes Test match there was a feeling the Australian team was spurred on my Darren Lehmann and could be competitive against the Poms.
But in reality it was through a cricketing miracle and with a benefit of some luck Australia came so close.
The cracks were visible after the 1st innings at Trent Bridge, but Agar sealed them as quick as Selleys ‘no more gaps’
As a nation Australia went gaga over Agar but instead we should have been contemplative on the thought had Agar been given out stumped the Australia would have been bowled out for 130.
Now it seems like the whole of Australia is diving into Shield Statistics, CA reports, youth programs, trying to figure out what is wrong with Australian cricket.
Few statistics have been published over the past few days on the declining batting numbers in Shield Cricket and the facts reveal some interesting patterns. The first distinct one is the number of hundreds in shield cricket last year was one of the worst recorded in history.
The number of hundreds scored last year was 32. In the previous years it was 46 and 48 respectively. If you go back another couple of years it was 56 and 58. Since the turn of the century 50 hundreds have been scored in every shield season expect for the last three ones.
Less individual hundreds have meant teams have struggled to accumulate huge totals. In the last three seasons combined, a team total of 500 has been achieved only on 5 occasions. Back in 09/10 a team score of 500 was bettered on 5 occasions. Go back another year and the figure stands at seven.
Huge scores are conjured up by virtue of large partnerships. Even large partnerships we have been accustomed to see have vanished. There was only one partnership of over 200 last year. The year before that they were nine and a one triple hundred partnership.
Players have come out in the last week and blamed the state of the pitches. No doubt the pitches have been bowler friendly but the number of times a team has been bowled out under 200 nearly doubled last season.
Yes, Australian fast bowling stocks are overflowing at the moment but how often have the top three bowlers been on the field together? This means the bowlers dismissing shield batsmen out cheaply are way down on the Australian pecking order and yet still having huge success.
Traditionally winning the toss and electing to bat in Australia is a no-brainer on most grounds. Over the past year scoring 400 in the first innings of the shield match was a rare occurrence. Last year team batting in the first innings of a match only managed to reach 400 once. In the two previous years it was only reached three times.
Over the last three years the worrying aspect is the average totals across all the grounds in Australia have not changed dramatically. There has been no trend on a particular ground or a specific innings that has been alarming.
It tends to suggest the nature of the wickets have remained fairly similar but the individual scores, partnerships, low scores have all skewed downwards.
Usman Khawaja and Matthew Wade have blamed the pitches rather than the BBL. They might be correct but in Khawaja’s case he only managed to convert one of his starts into a hundred.
Surely, once the batsmen are set on any kind of wicket his goal should be to get a big score. Michael Clarke elaborated on this point after the Lords test but if it’s not happening in shield cricket, it is unlikely to occur in the test arena.
Instead of performing health analysis and performance management on players, Pat Howard and co should look at the glaring concerns in the Sheffield shield last year.
Perhaps if they were then the present batting problems could have been eradicated, at least to a limit.
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