Sunday mash-up: Notes from the Basin IV
Lyon’s leg theory befuddled the Black Caps… why? PLUS: 'Super'' rounds
AUSTRALIA 383 & 164; NZ 179 & 196
Australia won by 172 runs
Even in the annals of predictable collapses, this one had more than an aura of inevitability.
Saturday provided a harmless injection of fun; a colour sidebar to the lead story.
That story was one of Australian dominance and an enfeebled home-team response. The crowds poured in again today, they poured out again at 12.57pm with plenty of time to return home, do the lawns and start on that shed you promised to clean out three months ago.
Cam Green might have played the singular innings of substance and picked up the man of the match gong, but he wasn’t the dominant figure here.
That would be Nathan Lyon, who added 10 wickets to the 517 he brought with him to the Basin. His diminutive frame cast an oversized shadow.
It is worth drilling down into his methodology to highlight a) the difficulties in combatting it, and b) New Zealand’s absence of a coherent batting plan.
This is what Lyon (and Pat Cummins as skipper) mostly did:
Lyon bowls around the wicket and to right-handers he darts it into middle and leg with a seven-two, in-out field. To repeat what I wrote yesterday those fielders are usually stationed at a leg slip, short leg, on the 45, square leg, the midwicket perch, plus boundary riders at long on and deep square. Mid-off and backward point stand largely unemployed. There are tweaks and the odd wrinkle, but this is the usual modus operandi.
He stays around the wicket to the left-handers this time with a seven-two or six-three off-side field, stacking the point region. If you’ve played cricket to a certain level and are of a certain vintage you would have heard coaches say that you don’t set a field for the cut because it is setting a field to bad bowling. Lyon doesn’t just turn that on its head, but he feeds the cut, knowing he has the boundary protected and that occasionally one will bounce a little more and bring the top edge into play.
It’s a devilishly simple strategy and one that paid major dividends when he discovered a Basin pitch that didn’t just turn, but also bounced. Tom Blundell twice popped up an inside edge, as did Kane Williamson and Tim Southee. Glenn Phillips was leg before when beaten on his inside edge one ball after another edge dropped centimetres short of Steve Smith at leg slip.
Scott Kuggeleijn, Matt Henry and Southee, recognising they didn’t have the capacity to defend successfully, were caught on the boundary slogging to the leg side.
Meanwhile, in the second dig, Tom Latham and Rachin Ravindra (59) fell when top-edging cuts, the latter a perfect example of Lyon’s patience as it was the umpteenth time Ravindra had essayed that particular shot. Ravindra looked great when playing it, but rarely got the reward you might expect for that type of risk as he continually hit into protection.
All told, being left-handed looks like the best way to play Lyon, which again is counter-intuitive.
I’m not sure what options there are for the right handers. We often talk about Wagner being used as a blunt instrument but if anything Lyon’s leg theory is even trickier to deal with because he also has the added advantage of turning the ball in the direction of his fielders. Sure, he can’t hurt you, but he can more than hinder you.
It is not my job to come up with solutions. That’s on Gary Stead, Luke Ronchi and the batting leaders and they did a poor job in trying circumstances. The tailenders just slogged but, really, was it any more silly an option than the tuck off the legs many of the recognised batters attempted?
“We didn’t expect it to turn the way it did… we certainly didn’t think it would spin as much as it did, with the turn and bounce on offer over the past couple of days,” Southee said, to which it was tempting to respond, “no bloody kidding.”
Williamson and Daryl Mitchell looked like they had done the most thinking about the Lyon problem. I liked Williamson’s decision to drop the knee and swivel-sweep-pull (can’t think of a more elegant way of describing the shot). It’s a shame he didn’t use it the ball he was dismissed. He looked filthy when he meekly placed it in leg slip’s hands, because that was the exact scenario he had been trying to avoid.
Mitchell wanted to reverse, but when the extra bounce made that too perilous he played right forward or deep in his crease, letting the ball cannon into his thighpad if it turned too much. Here’s the rub, though: Mitchell is not a 38 off 130-ball player. His natural scoring rhythm is in the mid-50s strike rate.
When you’re not getting many freebies at the other end either, everything starts to feel like you’re running in treacle.
Which is kind of where New Zealand finds itself, 1-0 down to a team that it simply has no idea how to score off.
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If you think I might have been too kind to the New Zealand brains trust and their inability to counter the threat of Lyon, consider this: Phillips, a bowler with more than 500 fewer poles than his counterpart and a lot less guile and accuracy, essentially copied Lyon’s methodology and came away with 5-43 in the second dig. There would have been some extremely sheepish people sitting in that changing shed yesterday afternoon, however, contemplating a scorecard that had Phillips absent from the bowling crease in the first innings.
The misreading of conditions is close to chronic and barely excusable.
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The two teams are unlikely to be greeted with a wicket that turns like that in Christchurch (though we said that about Hamilton following on from the Mount, and about Wellington following on from Hamilton), but that doesn’t mean they don’t need to do a lot more work in the nets. Lyon might not get the turn, but his topspin, overspin as some describe it, means he will always extract bounce.
New Zealand are going to have to get a lot smarter, and a lot busier.
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Don’t expect radical decisions between now and Friday. It’s not like this team is chronically out of form, even if it appears this way on most recent evidence. On my rudimentary graph, I only have three on the wrong side of the ledger (looking further back than just this test obviously), the obvious problem being that they are senior players in key positions.
Southee and Latham’s form has been heavily scrutinised but Blundell’s has slipped under the radar by comparison. When he scored a brilliant second-innings 90 against England on this ground last year, his test average stood at 45.31. Twelve really bad months later and his second innings duck here has pulled it back to 37.5, a frighteningly precipitous drop.
If Will O’Rourke’s hamstring rules him out it will be interesting to see who they bring in now that Neil Wagner has finished his long goodbye. Nathan Smith possibly picked a good time to take a sack of wickets for Wellington in the Plunket Shield.
Didn’t have my eye on a lot of other sports on the weekend, but how good was the final 15 minutes of Moana Pasifika and Fijian Drua? Moana held on somehow 39-36 despite second-half red and yellow cards. Some of the Drua’s long-range work was scintillating but few would begrudge the winners. It deserved a crowd.
This story outlines a lot of the folly of the ‘Super’ Round.
The round is a celebration of Pacific rugby, bringing together 12 teams in one city. The concept originated in the UK for rugby league’s Magic Weekend, and was first brought to Australia by the NRL for its own Magic Round. Super Rugby’s version began in 2022, and this year’s iteration is the third.
One Melbourne-based Rebels fan was entertaining his father on a trip from New Zealand for the second Super Round in a row. He said the organisers could have made more effort to celebrate international culture: “Where are the Pacific food stalls?”
There was one husband and wife, who had come down from Lennox Head in New South Wales to meet up with their son. “We came down for a family weekend,” he said. “The restaurants, the bars, and a bit of rugby,” his wife added. “But there’s not a huge crowd.”
On the Friday of last year’s Super Round, 15,282 fans turned up but this year’s attendance was down. The upper tier on the western side was closed, and just 10,582 bought tickets.
Doesn’t help that the home team Rebels are broke and about to fold - though they enjoyed a restorative win over the hopeless Force - or that (checks notes) Melbourne is NOT a rugby town.
Meanwhile, there were 40,000 on hand for the NRL’s showpiece in Las Vegas, which is on my screen as I write.
It’s hard to ascertain what the big-picture play is here, but the NRL appears to have got away with the double-header it without embarrassment, with the crowd significantly bigger than for the State of Origin in Long Beach in 1987 (about 12,000), and the 19,000 who apparently watched England beat the Kiwis in Denver in 2018.
The NRL’s push for new fans in the United States didn’t get off to the best start, with thousands of viewers missing kick-off due to overtime in a College basketball game.
The NRL struck a deal with News Corp powerbrokers to have the historic double-header shown on Fox Sports 1, the main channel of the American sports broadcaster.
Unfortunately, the first moments of rugby league in America were not shown on Fox 1, with the broadcaster staying with the college basketball game between Georgetown Hoyas and Xavier Musketeers.
Instead, the NRL was moved to the network’s secondary channel.
Are Liberty Media, Formula One’s owners, secretly delighted about the predicament Red Bull principal Christian Horner finds himself in?
The action on the track is likely to be numbing again if the season opener in Bahrain is anything to go by, with Max Verstappen winning by more than 20s from his Red Bull teammate Sergio Perez.
This replaces the Monday mash-up as I’m travelling tomorrow and have unavoidable commitments in the afternoon.
Apologies to all those who have commented without reply on the cricket over the past few days. I’ve been chasing my tale all over greater Wellington sorry and haven’t had time to go through it all. The bits and pieces I did see read like the usual Bounce comments section goodness: a lot of common sense, a few good ideas, and the odd thing I might not totally agree with, but can see your point. Please keep it rolling though. I love it when I see you all starting to talk/ write among yourselves.
Ever since we folded like a well lubricated deck chair this morning, I've been looking forward to Dylan's take.
I, for one, would like to see us be slightly brave in the second test by picking Nathan Smith if O'Rourke is done. Then, pick Santner no matter the conditions. It allows us to rotate our seamers through while Santner and Phillips do the mahi at the other end.
Our batting cupboard is worryingly bare though aye.
Oh, and FFS drop Kuggeleijn. You know why.
The Black Caps selectors are simply hollow shells. Forget about the form or otherwise of their selections, just consider the character of one of their selections. They stand for nothing and will fall for anything.
And I thought White Ferns selectors were the most galling people in NZ cricket ...