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| If Australian finger spinners want to be successful in world cricket today, they'd better learn how to bowl it or they will not last long. |
What skill do off-spinners such as Murali, Ajmal, Botha, Harbhajan and Mendis have that Hauritz and Krejza don't? They can bowl the doosra.
"Doosra" is an Urdu term meaning "the wrong one", or "the other one". If Australian finger spinners want to be successful in world cricket today, they'd better learn how to bowl it or they will not last long.
There are many shrewd cricket judges in Australia who believe that the doosra has to be thrown.
Well, whether they like it or not, the law has been changed now and the bowler can bend his arm up to 15 degrees and still make the delivery legal. What we now need to do is get our young spinners to bend their arms a bit and start to learn how to bowl the doosra.
But there is a problem — our attitude to coaching cricket in Australia. The last foreign coach to help out any first-class team in this country was Frank Tyson. Since his departure in the late 1970s, no foreign coach has been allowed to teach players how to develop their cricket.
Australia's biggest problem right now is that we don't have a decent spinner. On top of that, our quicks don't really understand how to bowl reverse swing properly.
If our two finger spinners in Nathan Hauritz and Jason Krejza are the best spinners we can produce, we must look for new spinning coaches because these guys are average at best.
The doosra pioneer is Pakistan's great off-spinner, Saqlain Mushtaq. He has taught many budding Pakistani off-spinners the art of bowling the doosra. We need to sign him up now and get him to Australia to teach Hauritz and Krejza how to bowl it. And fastSaqlain taught Saeed Ajmal about three years ago and look what he did to Australia in Dubai on Wednesday night.
We have had Waqar Younis living in Australia for two years now and he, along with Wasim Akram, were the best exponents of reverse swing there ever was. I have contacted officials at Cricket Australia and Cricket Victoria insisting that we should use Waqar, and yet he never receives a call.
We Australians think we know everything about the game and don't need outside help. You can call it silly pride or even a huge ego, but our attitudes are hindering the development of many young players. Just ask some of the NSW boys of their thoughts of Imran Khan, who taught them a few things about reverse swing when playing in Sydney in the 1980s.
And if our cricketing bodies should be thinking about getting a coach for our bowlers, they should get Pakistani great Javed Miandad along as well to teach our batsmen how to play spin. None of our batsmen have any confidence or conviction when playing quality spinners. They don't use their feet or watch the ball hard enough to hit holes in the field and turn the strike over.
I was fortunate enough to meet Lindsay Hassett, who gave me some pearls of wisdom for playing spin bowling. "If they toss it up, get down the pitch and hit it on the full, or on the half volley. If you cannot do that, then play them off the back foot! Now buy me a beer."
It's simple advice, but if the Australian batsmen continue to play spinners using just a forward defence, they'll soon be in trouble. It takes two batsmen working hard together and rotating the strike to beat quality spinners. And trust me, when the spinners say they "love it" when a batsman comes down the pitch to attack them, they are talking rubbish! They hate it. Great footwork will upset any spinner on any pitch.
The Australian team has a lot of soul-searching to do if it wants to win this ODI series against Pakistan. We must find quality coaches who can teach us the finer points of the game. How much would it really cost to bring out Saqlain and Waqar to coach our players?
Cricket is played mainly between the ears. We get in the way of ourselves most times when under pressure.
Once when I was under considerable pressure and concerned about my technique, I asked Geoff Boycott to have a look at me in the nets. Bob Simpson, the Australian team coach, was furious that I approached him. Boycott's advice was simple. My technique was OK. My head wasn't!
Boycott went on to say: "Is there any chance you can get to 20 without playing a daft shot?" He was right, and maybe a player such as David Hussey should take on board the same advice.
Sir Geoffrey added: "If I had your ability, Deano, and you had my brain, you would turn out to be a good player. But, Deano, if you had my ability and my brain you would have been a GREAT PLAYER!"
The Age
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