Former Australian cricketer Mike Whitney criticised premier off-spinner Nathan Lyon, saying he should have tried bowling from over the wicket and get his deliveries to bowl more towards the stumps during the second Border-Gavaskar Trophy Test.
After having figures of 1/126 in Australia’s crushing defeat by an innings and 132 runs in Nagpur, Lyon captured 5/67 and 2/49 in both innings in New Delhi, with six of his scalps coming from around the wicket.
“Look, I’m never going to criticise Nathan Lyon; he’s got 450-plus Test wickets. But he continually bowled around the wicket to that leg-side field. I wish he had have bowled over the wicket, attacking the pads and bowling into the stumps.”
“That’s what they do, and they do it really, really well. “Their fields are in exactly the right places and we’re under pressure all the time,” Whitney was quoted as saying on 2GB’s Wide World of Sports radio show on Tuesday.
Whitney, who played 12 Tests and 38 ODIs for Australia, was blunt over how the Test tour of India has panned out till now, saying Cummins and his teammates are in “a world of pain?”
He was also unhappy with debutant left-arm spinner Matthew Kuhnemann opening the bowling in his first Test appearance. Kuhnemann opened the bowling alongside captain Pat Cummins when India’s first innings with the bat was on. He would go on to take the new ball for India’s second innings alongside Lyon.?
“You see (Ravichandran) Ashwin take the new ball and bowl, and we sort of go, ‘Oh, a spinner with the new ball?’. Mate, he’s done that 500 times in India, in domestic cricket, one-day cricket, Test cricket. So, we throw the ball to Kuhnemann? on debut and say, ‘Away you go, champ!’. It’s just a whole new world.”
India have won the first two matches of the ongoing Border-Gavaskar Trophy and through the six-wicket victory in New Delhi, they have now retained the trophy through an unassailable 2-0 lead in the four-game series.
The third Border-Gavaskar Trophy Test between India and Australia will be played at Holkar Stadium in Indore from March 1-5, followed by the fourth and final game at the Narendra Modi Stadium in Ahmedabad from March 9-13.
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