Pringle: Funky fields... Let’s not forget the basics
everyone loves a plan. But did Joe Root get carried away with them at the Gabba? Michael Vaughan didn’t seem to think so. England’s former captain spent much of his commentary stints on BT Sport purring away at Root’s pro-action as if Einstein had suddenly been parachuted into some freckly, Yorkshire kid whose voice had not long broken.
Plans in cricket, like the technology that formulates them, have become increasingly complicated. Long gone are the scribbled notes on the back of a fag packet, though I see some football managers still prefer this method of ordering their thoughts.
Unsurprising then, that the elaborate held sway with Root in Brisbane, most notably with his funky fields and sudden switches of emphasis on Steve Smith, Australia’s captain.
Smith is currently the world’s No.1 Test batsman and he rode all that was thrown at him by Root and England with scarcely a frown.
Yes, England slowed him down but Tests are five-day marathons and the drag they placed on him had little overall effect other than to show him he could drop anchor, score a big hundred, and still see his side win by a distance.
England may not see it but Smith’s innings was a lesson to Root, if not in the art of setting plans, than in having the patience to see them through. Australia is not a place where you tend to run through batting line-ups quickly, unless there is extreme pace on show or the ball is moving lavishly, something it rarely does now that Shane Warne has retired.
Patience is paramount, especially from the bowlers.
It is why Glenn McGrath, a man who didn’t want to swing the ball, or bowl it at 90mph, or make it deviate much off the seam, is Australia’s most successful pace bowler with 563 Test wickets. Being tall helped him succeed, but not as much as his drip-drip accuracy and perseverance.
His ‘plan’ was to hit a good length hard just outside off-stump all day long. But then, most of Australia’s bowlers are set up mentally to play the long game.
At the Gabba, Root gave the opposite impression. Close to Vaughan, he seems to have bought in to the latter’s obsession with appearing busy as a captain, forever tinkering.
So, one moment it was keep it wide of off-stump to Smith, with a packed offside field, then it was to bowl straight at him with a packed on-side field.
Nothing wrong with trying things, but as one Australian writer, Greg Baum, observed, it was like Root went straight to ‘Plans B-D’ without giving ‘A’ long enough to work. In other words, he got a bit too ‘funky’ and impatient.
Mindsets may have changed but I always felt uncomfortable as a bowler if plans kept being shifted. For one thing, it suggests a captain does not really have faith in his bowlers to dismiss opponents in the traditional ways.
I don’t mind a ploy that plays on a batsman’s ego, such as when MS Dhoni used to bring Yuvraj Singh on to bowl when Kevin Pietersen walked to the crease.
But they have a limited shelf-life as does the sucker dismissal that snared David Warner in Australia’s first innings, when he flicked Jake Ball into the hands of straight mid-wicket.
The fielder was placed there for that shot but did Ball plan the execution that very ball? I doubt it, as I doubt Warner will fall that way again during the series, at least when he is the wrong side of 50.
Ideally, you need firepower in Australia to make things happen and Root’s on-field fiddling may be a manifestation of his frustration that he
Root seems to have bought in to Vaughan’s obsession with appearing busy as a captain
does not have much, at least compared to Australia’s two 90mph quicks, Mitchell Starc and Pat Cummins.
He also has a spinner, in Moeen Ali, who is unlikely to achieve the excellent work Nathan Lyon has so far managed for Australia, though Moeen does have a way of surprising people when they least expect it.
One plan Root did have in the first Test, which may have to be scrapped, was the deliberately short bursts he gave James Anderson and Stuart Broad, his two most experienced bowlers, in order to keep them fresh.
This may have been done, in part, due to the sapping humidity often found in Brisbane, something Adelaide should not have. But there were times when both Anderson and Broad were creating pressure only to be taken off before it could bear fruit just to preserve their puff.
The best captains and players improvise, as there is nothing like surprise or something unexpected to catch a batsman off guard.
Just look at how Australia dismissed England’s veteran batsman, Alastair Cook, in Brisbane. Caught at slip off Starc in the first innings, in the way most teams now plan to get him with the new ball – pitched up outside off-stump to draw him into that ungainly push of his, they changed tack in the second dig, bouncing him out to a shot he normally considered among his strengths.
What is more, it was the medium-fast Hazlewood who forced the error and not one of the fast and nasties. Cook miscued because he wasn’t expecting it. Instead, his focus would have been on guarding against the full length ball which Hazlewood likes to run across him on the angle, a temptation he would have been determined to resist. The bowler would have sensed that and instead gave him something he knew he would take on, the hook.
Was it planned? Only Hazelwood can tell us. But with only one man back on the leg-side I suggest it was a gamble which, with its element of surprise, paid off. It could well have repercussions, though, as it now gives Cook something else to consider in Adelaide, a place he was also bounced out four years ago, on that occasion by Mitchell Johnson.
Root, if he captains as he bats, will be determined and stubborn and probably won’t change his philosophy of trying to make things happen.
But as South Africa showed only a year ago, when they beat Steve Smith’s side 2-1, the best plans in Australia, whether with bat or ball, involve patience and discipline.