Australia’s display in Pallekele proved that the extra week spent in Sri Lanka had made little difference, and while they may have escaped with an 86-run lead on Wednesday, against better teams, the consequences are bound to be more severe
Daniel Brettig27-Jul-2016Bat big. Make it count. Bat once in the Test match. Be prepared to be boring. Rotate the strike. Be patient. Respect the conditions. Attack and defend at the right moments.All these phrases were uttered by Australia’s batsmen entering into this series, and they have been heard on other occasions too. None of that was in Steven Smith’s head when Rangana Herath looped up his first ball of the day to the Australian captain.Instead, Smith appeared to be working off the mantra he offered before the Test, about making sure he has a plan from ball one. Today’s ball one plan seemed to be to hit Herath as far as possible, out of Pallekele International Stadium and even out of the country. Those fevered thoughts drew a presumptuous charge down the wicket, a wild, head-in-the-air swing, and a stumping by yards. As Smith sat to ponder his choice of shot, it also precipitated the loss of Australia’s last eight wickets for a meagre 134. Adam Voges, who chose a more circumspect method, sought to explain his captain’s motivations.”We talk about taking risks early to try and spread the field and then getting ones, so he tried to take that risk early. If it comes off, it looks great; it didn’t come off today,” Voges said. “If he hits that over the top, then, all of a sudden, the field spreads a bit and he can knock ones around, that’s how he wanted to get into his innings.”Day two in Pallekele will be kept in the memory banks of the Sri Lankans, the Indians and everyone else due to face an Australian touring team in the future. As epitomised by Smith and a few of his comrades, Australian batsmen are still susceptible to being alternately lured out or boxed in by spin bowling on a helpful pitch. Unlike Dominica last year, Voges was unable to complete a full rescue operation, hard as he tried.”It was reasonably similar,” he said of the two surfaces. “We’ve had a bigger spin threat this game in terms of facing more spin than what we did in Dominica. The wicket was pretty similar, maybe this one skids on a little bit more on occasions than what Dominica did, but not too dissimilar.”That match in the West Indies, doubtless, entered the thinking of Herath this week. An exceptionally shrewd operator, Herath would be aware of how Devendra Bishoo spun through the Australians without a whole lot of bowling support at the other end, and how he successfully coaxed Smith into charging heedlessly at the wrong ball. While Smith’s talents are clear, and his record over the past two years more or less matchless, his death-or-glory approach to spin is allowing opponents to think he can be countered. As Bishoo had put it: “A lot of previous balls, he was coming. I knew exactly that he was coming. I just had to get it in the right place at the right time.”This, in turn, exposes others with games not so suited to these climes. Certainly, Joe Burns, Usman Khawaja and Mitchell Marsh allowed their limitations to be seen in the first innings of the series. Burns was not precise enough in covering up to Herath; Khawaja pinned on the crease from around the wicket; Marsh fighting hard but unable to make head or tail of the excellent debutant Lakshan Sandakan’s left-arm wrist spin. Voges fared better in another example of how his composed, simple technique and experienced head has reaped such handsome returns thus far, but wicketkeeper Peter Nevill’s attempt to shovel Herath over mid-on was almost as unsightly as Smith’s charge down the pitch.Perhaps, the most unsettling element of Australia’s display was that it showed the extra week’s practice in Sri Lanka did not make a great deal of difference to thinking and execution when the Test match began. Even Voges conceded that despite training for and discussing exactly how Herath was going to try to attack a new batsman – namely sliding one down the line of the steps while looking to hit the front pad – he was unable to stop it from happening.”I know that was probably the plan – to try to hit my pad first ball. That’s what we’ve been training for the last two weeks – to try to avoid that situation,” he said. “A little bit of heart in mouth, you sort of look up towards the change rooms to see, Mitch Marsh sat down again pretty quickly when the review came, so I felt a little bit better after that.”He doesn’t miss his areas, does he? He’s canny, mixes his pace. There hasn’t been a great deal of spin there for him, but he’s been very economical, he’s taken four wickets and we always knew going into this series that he’d be their main threat. So I think we can play him better than what we did today, and we’ll be looking to do that moving forward.”In the back of each player’s mind will be the fact that today’s misstep need not be terminal to Australia’s chances in this match. They still scraped a lead of 86, and a wicket for Mitchell Starc put further space between the sides before afternoon rain returned once more. But against better teams on other days, it may well be far more damaging – India 2013, UAE 2014 and England 2015 all stand as prime examples.With the benefit of time, the plans that came unstuck at Pallekele may yet prove valuable against others, provided they are leavened with a stronger dose of common sense. This team was never going to overcome an Asian blindspot in the space of a single innings. Many more hard lessons and experiences remain to be had.”It’s about having plans against each bowler and just sticking to and trusting those plans,” Voges said. “We spoke a bit about that tonight, that some guys it didn’t quite work for them today, but they’ve got to trust those plans that that’s going to work for them. For me, it’s going to be different from the other guys, but it will be, the more experience we get over here, the more we can fine tune those plans and feel more confident about them.”In the words of Brad Pitt, channeling Billy Beane, in : “It’s a process, it’s a process, it’s a process…”
