On next Ashes tour, let’s get serious instead of winging it
GEoRGE GARToN was chucking them down in the nets in Townsville. He is 20, has played nine first-class games and is fast.
Not medium fast, not off the seam, quite lively, low eighties. Fast. Not Jimmy Anderson or Stuart Broad, or any number of pale, inferior imitations of England’s brilliant strike partnership. Garton is what Joe Root’s team lack in Australia, unless Mark Wood returns from injury. An actual quick bowler.
And before anyone mistakes this for a bandwagon, he is also nowhere near good enough.
He bowled 10 overs for England Lions against a Queensland XI last week and was carted to all corners — 86 runs, no wickets. His first- class average is 36.47, his best figures for Sussex three for 20. Nobody in their right mind would suggest Garton is close to ready for this Ashes tour.
But the next one? That could be different. It might be worth thinking about. It might be that the ECB, with all their resources, need to start planning ahead.
More than any other event in their calendar, the Ashes define English cricket. There is interest in visits to the sub-continent and South Africa, but even when England and Australia are nowhere near the summit of Test cricket, the Ashes capture the imagination.
Yet what have the selectors sent Down Under? England’s best players, basically. Not a team tailored to Australian conditions or Australian strengths and weaknesses. Not a group selected for one purpose. With Wood out, England have no quicks to extract the most from ferocious Australian tracks.
Equally, a team of left-handed batsmen are already beginning to struggle against Australia’s most successful right-arm off-spinner, Nathan Lyon.
This was predictable. Lyon may well finish as the world’s leading wicket- taker in 2017, having already claimed 51 victims — three behind Kagiso Rabada’s 54 for South Africa. Rabada, however, has bowled in three more innings than Lyon, while the only others above him in the list — Rangana Herath of Sri Lanka and Ravi Ashwin of India — have bowled four.
So coming to Australia top heavy with left- handers has played to Lyon’s strength. And England would have known that. Given the number of lefties in the world, Lyon’s success against them is disproportionate.
In 2016, Cricinfo gave the number of left-handers in Test history as 19 per cent, yet close to half of Lyon’s victims in 2017, 24 of his 51, bat left-handed. It’s not even as if England have played into a trap. A trap requires camouflage. Lyon’s strength was in plain sight, given the way he whipped through a similarly sinister Bangladesh team.
In the first innings of the second Test in Chittagong in September, he took the top four Bangladesh batsmen, all of whom are lefthanders. He then got two of them again in the second innings, finishing the match with 13 wickets. So it is not as if there wasn’t a warning, not as if we
hadn’t witnessed the impact of Graeme Swann in similar circumstances; and not as if england’s tour of India was not an indication, either.
The only off- spinner ahead of Lyon this season is Ashwin, yet england’s top order in India last year had five left-handers of six. unsurprisingly, roughly two-thirds of Ashwin’s 28 Test series wickets were left-handed batsmen.
‘england’s team for this first Test surprised me,’ wrote Nasser Hussain. ‘If you look at the trial by spin ahead in the form of Ashwin, you do not want five of your top six being left-handers. That’s a concern.’
If similar numbers unfold in Australia for Lyon, it can hardly be a revelation. england have been here before — and very recently. We continue hearing how important the Ashes is and yet england almost wing it.
Just as a football manager picks specific players for specific games — Darren fletcher said that Sir Alex ferguson would sometimes tell him three weeks in advance to get ready for, say, Chelsea, and then leave him out of every match before that fixture to keep him fresh — could there be a long-term strategy in which young prospects are identified for their potential worth in unique conditions, and then conditioned specifically to that event?
TAke Garton. When england next tour here he will be 24. Is it not conceivable that in the interim years he might be the subject of some targeted coaching focus, if what england lack in Australia is pace? Is it wise to leave him, and any other fast bowlers showing promise, to develop through county cricket?
If england lack Australia’s specialists — like Lyon, like Pat Cummins — is there really nothing that can be done? Clearly, if Garton is going for 8.6 an over in Lions cricket, he may never be the answer. Then again, does he need better direction, a specific goal? The target that ferguson would put in front of his players, made long-term.
Could Garton be sent out in the winter to bowl in Australian conditions and learn? Do we have to get serious about this? The 2010-11 tour aside, england are increasingly struggling away at the Ashes.
The tours either side of that were lost 5- 0, the one in 2002-03 was lost 4-1, the two before that 3-1. yes, Australia were a strong team, but there were plenty of whitewash predictions when this tour started, too, and few believe Steve Smith’s squad are a patch on their predecessors.
If england were to get Wood back, and who knows what will happen with Ben Stokes — although he’s another lefthanded batsman — there would be more zip in the attack and a change in the feeling that the tourists can be bullied by pace without fear of reprisal.
yet it does not alter the sense that for all of england’s detailed preparation, one of elite sport’s basic rules is being ignored: that a team is picked to win the game, not simply because it contains the best 11 players. The next Ashes tour is four years away. It’s never too early to start thinking about that.