LYON BITTEN BY MOTHER CRICKET
Few Englishmen will weep for the sledger-in-chief
If England could have chosen an Australian cricketer to make the fatal fumble that may just have handed them the Ashes then the name of Nathan Lyon would have been on many lips.
David Warner may have epitomised the toxic culture that brought him and Steve Smith down in Cape Town but it is the former Adelaide groundsman who has carried on traditional Australian attempts in this series at ‘mental disintegration’.
It has been Lyon who has not been short of a word whenever a new England batsman has come to the crease during this Ashes and it has been his approach more than any of his team-mates that has been at odds with Australia’s new ‘squeaky clean’ image.
So there were more than a few England players past and present who would have been tempted to smile when Lyon bungled the most simple of run- out chances with Jack Leach stranded and just two runs needed for an England third Test victory, or when Lyon threw himself to the floor in desperate frustration as Joel Wilson turned down the appeal for lbw against Ben Stokes off the very next ball that technology insisted was out.
Not least Matt Prior, who was the victim of a completely unprovoked verbal attack by Lyon in the build-up to the last Ashes before Australia’s whole poisonous system came crashing down around their ears with the Sandpapdergate cheating scandal.
It was in Brisbane towards the end of a long media session before the first Test in 2017 that Lyon sauntered in and told us that Prior was trying to get out during the 2013-14 series because he was ‘ scared’ of Mitchell Johnson.
He went on to say how he wanted to end English careers, a theme that was taken up by Josh Hazlewood on friday when he said the scars England suffered from being dismissed for 67 at Headingley would take a long time to heal. Well, both of them have now been bitten on the backside by what people in the game like to call ‘Mother Cricket’.
The one Australian it is possible to have sympathy with is captain Tim Paine, who was given the mother of all hospital passes when he took over the Australian captaincy from the disgraced Steve Smith and has done all he can to clean up their act.
What he cannot do is perform as a Test-class player and Paine’s leadership was shown to be as questionable as his batting on Sunday when he was tactically naive in the field during England’s epic last-wicket stand and incompetent in his use of reviews. When Smith was playing at Edgbaston he virtually took over from Paine ( right) in the field but he is banned from any leadership role until March and there really are no other credible candidates to take over from the likeable wicketkeeper from Tasmania. What will really hurt Australia is that there was only one word to describe the Lyon fumble and the desperate Paine review that cost Australia the Ashes, at least for now, when even Pat Cummins appeared to be telling him not to challenge the decision when he struck Jack Leach outside leg-stump. And that word is the one sportspeople bristle at — choke. Consider these stats from the BBC’s Andrew Samson. Australia have been involved in 16 Tests in which the winning margin has been one wicket or fewer than 10 runs. They have only won four of those and lost 12 and since 1952 they have lost all nine. And we think of South Africa as chokers.
It will take a lot for Australia to come back from such a crushing blow as Headingley and it will be fascinating to see whether there is more humility now from Lyon, who quietly became the third most prolific bowler in Australian Test history on Sunday.
Sadly for him the cricketing fates, aka Mother Cricket, were to hand him a very different reason to remember one of the most incredible days in Test history.