Mitchell Johnson clouds the future

< 1 minute read

We’ve always had a desire to balance out the names of this world. Some people have two first names, like Brett Lee for example. It’s only right that there’s a yang to Lee’s yin and that’s where Mitchell Johnson comes in.

Mitchell Johnson’s got two surnames, so he can swap one of his surnames with Brettles and we’ll get Brett Mitchell and Lee Johnson. Now everybody’s much happier.

That’s the only good thing about Mitchell Johnson, because other than that, we’re afraid it’s all bad news. First you hoped that Australia would be reliant on ageing medium-pacers for ever. You thought that they’d endlessly rotate Jason Gillespie and Michael Kasprowicz.

Then, when that plan was filed away in the bin, you comforted yourself with the thought that Shaun Tait’s ‘if I don’t know where they’re going, how will the batsman?’ approach was actually just a tacit admission that he was crap.

Then you heard a rumour. A ‘once in a generation’ bowler. A quick left-armer of nous and pace by the name of Mitchell Johnson. You watched him nervously. He was promising, but maybe that promise wouldn’t be fulfilled.

Today, as he took 5-26 against a by-no-means-ordinary Indian batting line-up in their home conditions, you detected a dark future where Australia’s bowling line-up wasn’t a dizzying melange of the mundane and the incompetent.