What time is the fifth Ashes Test – Australia vs. England? TV channel, live streaming details for SCG Test<\/a><\/p>\n\u201cWe\u2019ve always had good hard flat pitches (in Australia) that you learn to take wickets on as a fast bowler and as a spinner,\u201d he continued.<\/p>\n
\u201cYou also learn to bat big as a batsman, you make a pile of runs and kick the door down to play for Australia\u2014that\u2019s not happening at the moment because too often Shield pitches aren\u2019t up to it, they\u2019re not good enough.\u201d<\/p>\n
Former Test opener Matthew Hayden was equally as vocal, also pointing to the negative impact increasingly green and grassy wickets at Sheffield Shield level were having on the development of spinners across the country.<\/p>\n
\u201cIf you want to win the World Test Championship, when you\u2019re (needing to win) on away venues, particularly on the subcontinent, you\u2019ve got to have a world class spinner,\u201d Hayden said.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe\u2019ve developed one in Nathan Lyon and now we\u2019re trying to develop additional spinners across the formats\u2014and we don\u2019t have them at hand in my opinion, largely because the Sheffield Shield wickets are starting extremely green and grassy, that\u2019s the nature of drop-in wickets. Something has to give.\u201d<\/p>\n
Retired 46-Test veteran Greg Blewett agreed and said the issue hasn\u2019t just emerged this summer.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe\u2019ve been talking about it for years, but maybe this (the two-day Test finishes in Perth and Melbourne) is the line in the sand,\u201d Blewett added, before warning of another likely change that could potentially make things even worse.<\/p>\n
\u201cThe other sad thing that will happen as a result of this is the curators are going to lose control of their pitches, there\u2019s no doubt that Cricket Australia are going to employ someone to go from venue to venue and oversee the preparation.\u201d<\/p>\n
While James Brayshaw felt that could be a positive move, Hayden agreed wholeheartedly with Blewett describing the move as \u2018complete frog sh*t\u2019.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt\u2019s a very relevant point to the tradition of the game (for curators to prepare pitches independently), it\u2019s also really important that you give accountability to the people you employ,\u201d Hayden said.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe are a country of middle managers and if you put another person into the mix, a boffin, you tell me how a boffin is (going to improve things)\u2014is he going to get down on his knees and measure the grass?\u00a0<\/p>\n
\u201cYou put another person in the ring and it will make our pitches a lot worse.\u201d<\/p>\n
Hayden also warned of conflict between ground curators and supervisors.\u00a0<\/p>\n
\u201cThere are venues around the world that do that including the BCCI (India), and a lot of times you get great resistance between the two roles,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt\u2019s like a building site, everyone hates that person (who comes in and tells them what to do), it creates a poor ecosystem.\u201d<\/p>\n
James Brayshaw then concluded the pitch discussion as succinctly as he began.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe cannot have 36 wickets falling inside two days in a Test match, ever again.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n
Surely few Test cricket fans would argue with that.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"With Cricket Australia facing multi-million dollar losses from the two-day Ashes Tests in Perth and Melbourne, the quality…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":384178,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[564],"tags":[64,63,740,85],"class_list":{"0":"post-384177","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-cricket","8":"tag-au","9":"tag-australia","10":"tag-cricket","11":"tag-sports"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/384177","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=384177"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/384177\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/384178"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=384177"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=384177"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=384177"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}