Cricket Slump
Alot of the media seemed to have jumped on the bandwagon of writing off our World Cup chances. This, only a month or so after we were lauded for smashing England in the Ashes.
Whats changed since then? We’ve lost Martyn, Warne and McGrath has announced his retirement. But that was no change to our one day attack, apart from that, Symonds has been injured and Lee limped out of training with an Injury. We’ve lost to England in the finals of our one day series after dominating the qualifiers, dropped the number 1 one day cricket position to South Africa who have pantsed Pakistan and we’ve lost the Hadlee-Lillee series to New Zealand.
Should it really be a case of red alert or is everyone just over reacting.
Personally I think that there is nothing we can really do other than ride this out. I don’t think we are any less talented a side than when we beat England in the Ashes. Martyn and Warne don’t play in the one day side, McGrath is still playing and Lee was always expensive. Our best bowler in our previous one day series in South Africa was Stuart Clark and we didn’t have Mcgrath then either. Sure there has been a change over of bowlers recently as we try and find a new lineup but still.
Firstly I think our ashes campaign took alot out of the team. It was always going to be hard to follow up a full summer of trying to smash the poms and qualify for the finals. I don’t think we’ve ever had such a demanding line up of events before. We relaxed after qualifying and thats the most dangerous thing when you’ve kept up the intensity for such a long time. I coach football and I know that once you step down in intensity after long periods it’s hard to pick it back up and sometimes you have to work harder and other times its impossible without burning out. Regardless of our skill I think we will have to wait and hope that they can pick it up their play, they need a rest but aren’t going to get it so hopefully someone can pull out something special.
Secondly we’ve seen Australia play on many a batting wicket in recent weeks. The Australian grounds have been rubbish for bowling this season, they’ve over compensated for many matches that have finished prematurely due to our dominating performances and decided to at least give other teams a chance with batting wickets. Our problem is that whilst our bowlers are good at getting wickets on a bowling wicket, we’ve always been poor on batting wickets. Very few of our bowlers know how to bowl to contain a team (McGrath and Clark aside), in fact I would suggset that we have never been of the attitude that we should contain. We’ve always been of the atitude that we should destroy other teams, which is fair enough but we don’t usually play on flat batting wickets. Having said that, I think the wickets in the West Indies will suit us more than most other teams.
Finally to say our bowlers let the side down in this last loss to NZ as some articles suggest, is ridiculous. We took more wickets than New Zealand did, we just didn’t contain them enough.
