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Pat Cummins’ captaincy is being lambasted by a gleeful English press corp with his efforts from whoa to go on day two of the fourth Test blasted as the Aussies lost their grip on the match and possibly the Ashes urn.
Cummins was dismissed from the first ball of the day and his tactical decisions in the field were constantly a step behind the English batters with Zak Crawley, Joe Root and Moeen Ali ensuring the tourists chased leather all over the Old Trafford arena.
The Times columnist Simon Wilde summed it up by saying Cummins had lost the plot as the Bazballing home side befuddled the Australians.
“LOST ITEM: 1 plot. If found, please return to Mr Patrick Cummins, captain of the Australia cricket team, c/o Lancashire CCC, Old Trafford, Manchester,” he wrote.
“It is never easy being a captain who must play a leading role with the ball, but his head was clearly spinning as Zak Crawley and Joe Root ran him and his players ragged.
“Australia did not know how to keep either man quiet. Hazlewood, who only managed one spell lasting two overs, packed the off side with six men and bowled wide of off stump but Crawley still found a way through.
“Starc tried two plans: one involving six men on the leg side with another three behind square on the off side, meaning there was no one in front of the wicket on the off; the other with only two men to leg.
“Cummins was sufficiently bewildered that he had a leg-side field and an off-side field in the same over, and failed to bowl properly to either.
“Glenn McGrath, that arch voice of Australian optimism, gave his own verdict: “I’m not sure I’ve ever seen Test cricket like this.”
Wisden editor Lawrence Booth didn’t hold back when it came to the visiting captain’s efforts.
“All cricketers have bad days. But Cummins doesn’t have many, and even his bad ones are usually half-decent. This, though, was something else: a stinker inside a shocker wrapped in a sickener. He can barely have experienced anything like it,” he wrote in a column for The UK Daily Mail.
“Australian teams do many things, but total disintegration tends not to be among them. In Manchester on Thursday, Cummins presided over his country’s most shambolic session in an Ashes Test since they were bowled out for 60 on the first morning at Trent Bridge eight years ago.
Pat Cummins. (Photo by Alex Davidson/Getty Images)
“Up in the commentary box, Ricky Ponting was trying to understand Cummins’s ‘confusion’: ‘Are we going to try to take wickets or stem the flow of runs?’ The answer was an emphatic ‘neither’.”
Former England captain Nasser Hussain in the same masthead was critical of Australia’s tactics in trying to dismiss Crawley, who rode his luck while offering several half-chances.
“To be honest, Australia bowled poorly at him early on; from the first ball he gloved for four down the leg side, they were too straight. Everyone knows how strong he is off his pads and off his hip, how good he is on the pull and they fed him,” he wrote in his column.
“If a bowler swings it in, he has the perfect bat plane to clip it through the on-side but his nemesis is the one that shapes away.
“Australia just didn’t bowl enough there to exploit that vulnerability despite him driving balls on the up, and it meant they failed to build up pressure.”
Veteran columnist Scyld Berry at the UK Telegraph descirbed England’s dominance as overwhelming for the Australians.
“Australia is renowned as the home of marsupials, Aussie Rules and the Big Bash. But in the fourth Test they have discovered that England are now producing some even bigger bashers,” he wrote.
“By the end of it the Australians looked shot, or at least visibly wounded, as the stress of playing their fifth Test since mid-June caught up with them.”
In the same masthead, Tim Wigmore blasted Australia for their decision to play it safe with two pace-bowling all-rounders ahead of spinner Todd Murphy.
“Australia picked an imbalanced side, comprising only three frontline bowlers and two batting all-rounders, with Head’s locum off spin in support. It was a disjointed line-up: the sort that, for all Australia’s protests to the contrary, contained more than a whiff of being content with a draw,” he wrote.
“The upshot was that, at a decisive juncture in the Ashes series, Australia had to use Head in a novel role: as first-choice spinner. Recognising the importance of a calculated assault, Crawley greeted Head with a reverse sweep for four, and then a slog sweep for six.
“Head’s six overs in the afternoon session yielded 48 runs, forcing Cummins to bowl his three frontline seamers more. Murphy would have been braced for an England assault too, but would have been better-equipped for the task.”
Their bowling was also offline.
“While luck eluded Australia, they were also inaccurate: 37 per cent of deliveries in the morning session to Crawley and Moeen Ali were either in line with the stumps or drifting down the leg side, allowing them to score freely off their pads.
“Rather than stick to pounding away just outside Crawley’s off stump, Australia swiftly resorted to the short ball, a delivery against which he thrives.
“For vast swathes of the afternoon, Cummins’ tactics were those that schoolboys are taught to avoid: following the ball. Consider how, in one Cummins over, Australia shifted from having seven men on the leg side, braced for a short ball, to having seven on the off side. Every change merely created a new gap for Crawley’s imperious strokeplay, and Root’s 360-degree hitting, to exploit.”
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