James Pattinson and Australian desperation

2 minute read

It’s been a great period in Australian cricket. There have been so many poor performances that the nation attained that blissful state where everyone’s running around screaming ‘do something!’ without any agreement as to what that something might be.

It didn’t matter who was right and who was wrong, just so long as you had an opinion. For the most part, the wrong opinions were the ones that won out though, which was just excellent. Top quality opening batsmen were dropped and incompetent opening bowlers were shown ‘faith’. The decisions were inexplicable. All that was important was to be seen to be doing something. Anything.

Clinging to competence

The chaos became so complete that everyone lost confidence in Australian cricketers. Perform semi-competently and a bowler could retain his place in the side even if he could only manage two successive days of cricket without getting injured. It seemed worth gambling on someone who was semi-okay, because what was the alternative?

Well, get enough injuries and you find out. The alternatives were the likes of James Pattinson and Patrick Cummins who both had stunning debuts. Even if they don’t maintain those standards, they’ve still done enough to indicate they’re probably a better bet than Mr Glass and a left-armer who’s basically a bowling machine mounted on a potter’s wheel.

Add to that the fact that Nathan Lyon hasn’t been dropped yet, despite having played several matches, and there’s a worrying possibility that Australia could actually have bottomed-out. There’s even talk of dropping Phil Hughes in favour of a batsman.