Australia batting problems, why Sheffield Shield batting averages have dipped, what Cricket Australia is doing to boost Australian batters, news, feature, analysis

As Mark Waugh assessed the prospects auditioning to be the nation’s next Test batter prior to Matt Renshaw’s recall, the Aussie great and former selector paused before identifying what is a significant problem.

“They’re probably not bashing the door down,” he said.

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That may be the case with the nation’s Sheffield Shield cricketers but it is not so with the critics howling about the shock loss to Bangladesh and what it means for Australia’s future.

The Aussies either hold or have won every major series or international championship over the past five years but the Darwin debacle demonstrates all is not well at the elite level.

Australia may have found it hot in the Top End when mauled by the Tigers but the furnace will become hellish if they falter in Mackay in what is a defining year for a champion team and the world is watching to see how the Aussies respond.

South African great Barry Richards has no doubt how the Darwin disaster will have been received by his compatriots ahead of the highly-anticipated three Test series in October.

“With glee, I should imagine, mostly,” he told foxsports.com.au.

“We have been on the receiving end – except for rugby of course, or the Commonwealth Games, of course, where you won a truck load of medals – but generally speaking, whenever Australia is beaten by a minnow or the underdogs, it is pretty well accepted here.”

With Weatherald gone and Marnus Labuschagne under significant scrutiny, expert analysts around the country were running the ruler over prospective Test contenders during the Darwin Test.

Exacerbating the issue, as noted by Waugh and fellow great Adam Gilchrist after the loss, is that there is no Sheffield Shield batter who has been screaming out “Pick Me. Pick Me.”

While bowlers have flourished in a seamers paradise in domestic cricket in recent years, life has been conversely more barren for batters given the dearth of runs delivered in the Shield. The land of opportunity has become a country of few runs.

Sam Konstas has talent. But he averaged 33 last season. So, too, Campbell Kellaway, who made 509 runs at 27.

Others including Nathan McSweeney (477 runs at 28), Jason Sangha (571 at 33), Kurtis Patterson (610 at 36) and Peter Handscomb (724 at 34) all had moments.

Four of those batters, by the way, have already worn the Baggy Green in their careers, and so too Renshaw, who made 499 runs at 50 at nearly 50 in a Shield season that included three centuries, hence his recall to the national team.

Australian cricket is littered with players who have been banished from the Aussie Test team before returning to become champions, with Ricky Ponting and Steve Waugh notable examples.

It is yet to be seen whether Labuschagne can regain his best touch after being dropped in the West Indies, while selectors will be desperately hoping that it proves the case of third time lucky for Renshaw, who was first chosen a decade ago.

Those under fire in Darwin, which included Cameron Green before the Test and Beau Webster afterwards, are the batters who had been excelling in Sheffield Shield, which does not inspire confidence in aspirants hoping to secure a Baggy Green.

“It’s Test cricket for Australia, so you want to pick your best team,” Gilchrist said.

“I don’t know if there’s anyone in any position that’s not in the team that has knocked the door down or warrants pushing anyone out.”

Where are the runs?

The Top End embarrassment has shone the spotlight on a problem Australian cricket has already identified, as evidenced by the call-to-arms at a camp in Brisbane late last month.

Sheffield Shield coaches, batting gurus, bowling bigwigs and all manner of high-performance personnel mulled over the state of play across the land in a quest for solutions to bolster batting averages, improve the lot of spin bowlers and build players of international calibre.

Peter Roach, the head of operations at Cricket Australia, told the organisation’s website the primary goals were to address those issues amid conjecture as to why runs have dried up in the hope of blooding a new generation of Aussie stars.

“This year we’ve really focused on, ‘Is there a way that we can – through our playing conditions – encourage more runs, more spin overs, without really distorting the cricket?” he told cricket.com.au.

“Our challenge at the moment is we want to see more runs and we want to see more overs of spin, because they’re the two things that have stood out the most in the past couple of years.

“But we think currently our Sheffield cricket is preparing players well for Test cricket.”

The statistics paint an alarming picture. The batting average across the board in the last Sheffield Shield season was a tick over 27 runs, almost 10 below the pre-pandemic figure.

Richards, an ICC Cricket Hall of Fame inductee who spent two decades in Australia, is not as convinced the aspirants coming through Shield cricket are prepared for the Test arena despite the statements from CA.

The South African legend is concerned about the broader future of Test cricket given the threat from the juggernaut that is T20, but also the detrimental impact it is having on domestic red ball cricket. And he says Australia is key to the future.

“I have got an Aussie passport and I lived there for 20 years, so I don’t take glee in it, because I think it is very important for Australia to be a strong nation and it is very important for them to be setting the trend, which they have done for a number of years,” he said.

“But you go back to why it is not happening and that is because of the Shield. The Shield is not what it was. The pathways that they have taken players out of grade cricket, it takes them out of Shield cricket and they do not have enough tough cricket and when they get to the top level, it shows.”

Green put to rest speculation about his spot when scoring his first Test century on home soil, but coach Andrew McDonald made it clear that Labuschagne and Weatherald needed runs prior to the latter being axed on Tuesday.

This was the case before the series as well but Jason Gillespie said it was important that those who have performed well in domestic cricket are given an extended run at Test level.

Weatherald was backed through the Ashes but did not cement his spot and it will be fascinating to see how the squad for South Africa shapes up and whether there is room for other leading lights in the Sheffield Shield.

“I don’t mind talented players that perform well at domestic level being given an extended run with the national side. The chances are they are going to come good and have significant careers,” Gillespie told foxsports.com.au.

Shave that grass

Cricket Australia has opted against removing the bonus points on offer in domestic cricket for now, though there is a belief that it has led to a drive for pitches that deliver results.

But it has implored curators around the country to prepare decks providing a fair balance between bat and ball which should lead to more robust First Class batting averages.

As CA’s cricket chief James Allsopp said on the Seven Network during the Darwin Test; “If the curator is debating whether to shave the grass coverage to six centimetres or seven centimetres, we want them to shave it to six.”

But that in itself raises the question as to whether dumbing down decks, so to speak, is actually in the best interests for developing cricketers capable of delivering against the best.

After the debacle in Darwin, fingers were pointed at Australian captain Pat Cummins for his decision to bat in what proved the most difficult time for those wielding the willow.

But as he lamented after the loss when saying Australia needed to find a way to bat for longer, if the top order survived that period, batting became far easier on Days 2 and 3.

Richards, who keeps a keen eye on the Australian scene from afar, has no doubt the point raised by the captain and other critics is a fair one not isolated to the Darwin debacle and nor to Australia either.

He is not calling for a Geoffrey Boycott-style blocker but said a top-order batter should have the capacity to lock down in challenging conditions. It is Test cricket, after all, he stressed.

“Players don’t seem to want to do the hard yards. Slogging through the hard bit seems to be the trend. If it becomes hard, just play shots … it seems, unfortunately.” he said.

“I don’t want to come back to the blocking stage, because that is probably not as entertaining, but you do need somebody – if I can put it in Boycott terms – providing stability at the top of the order. In most cases, someone who bats through the innings with quite a platform, or certainly a challenging platform for an opposition to chase.

“If you are only chasing 57, it is not that difficult. But if you are chasing 157, it becomes a different and slightly more difficult situation mentally.”

‘Never been harder’ – Aussie coach on the dearth of runs

When it comes to breaking down the averages last year – or the breakdown of batting – the Australian hierarchy are offering a version of the saying “Lies, damned lies and statistics.”

If 40 is the new 30 when it comes to assessing a cricketer’s age, according to what the CA boffins have described as the “carry percentage”, 30 runs now equates to the old 40.

“I think they (quality domestic players) are there and I think sometimes not enough recognition is given to the quality of our Shield and domestic set-up,“ McDonald told ESPN in Brisbane recently.

“They’ve been challenged as well in terms of the scores and the average totals across the board, and it’s been well documented. Spin overs have dropped, and seam bowlers are averaging under 20, and batters are averaging mid-30s. And there’s some relativity to that, isn’t there?

“If you looked at, I’m just going to pluck a year, but let’s say it’s somewhere around 2005 or something like that, domestic batters might have been averaging 50, and bowlers are averaging 30. So there’s a 20-run difference in that. So I think they’ve been challenged.“

Life is difficult for batters at domestic level. But will making it easier to score on flatter decks do anything to improve defensive techniques or temperament? That is not certain.

The impact of T20 cricket both domestically and around the world is having a significant impact on both techniques and concentration, far more than one-day cricket ever did.

As Richards said, in ODI cricket, it was hoped at least one batter could steer the team through the majority of the innings, resisting where required before building momentum.

But with a paucity of ODIs being played, and T20 franchise cricket becoming dominant, there is a concern that learning how to pace an innings is also becoming an art that looks in peril.

McDonald noted it was a challenge in an extended chat with Fox Footy’s AFL 360 host Gerard Whateley preceding the Bangladesh series, saying batting was now more complex.

This was leading to greater specialisation at international level, with very few batters trying their hand at all three formats. But in lower grades there is more call to be an everyman.

“I don’t think batting has ever been harder or more complex than in the modern age with all three formats,” McDonald said on SEN.

“It’s very difficult for players to flip in and out and invest time and be everything in every format. And there’s not too many who have done it. You can name them on one hand, the players who are still branching across all three formats.”

Double the trouble

Steve Smith described it as the perfect storm for coinciding with the move across the country for pitches that would produce results was the introduction of a Kookaburra that came with an added layer of lacquer.

As Greg Baum wrote in The Age, the all-important seam “stayed prouder for longer” and it proved akin to introducing a pest, with the combination deadly for batters as bowlers relished the chance for revenge.

After scoring his 33rd Test century at the Gabba in 2024, an outstanding knock that broke an extended run of outs, the Australian champion said the change to the ball made it harder for longer while enhancing its capacity to seam as well.

“I think since 2021 when they changed the Kookaburra ball, batting has got more difficult, particularly when at the same time wickets have got greener, so it’s kind of like the perfect storm coming together,” Smith said.

“The ball’s definitely staying harder, so I think the last three years have probably been the hardest that I’ve experienced in my career batting-wise in terms of the amount of movement that’s being generated. I think you can see that in the way scores have come down – bowling averages have come down and batting averages have come down.

“If you look back five years ago you’re seeing consistent 400, 500s being scored in the first innings, if you put a three in front of it these days you’re usually in a pretty strong position so you know you’ve got to think about that as well when you’re thinking about play. Sometimes if you don’t get a hundred, it’s not the end of the world.”

The reason it was introduced in the first place was to correct what was occurring when Renshaw was first introduced into the Test team in 2016 when batters plundered and bowlers perished on flat decks across the big, brown land.

With Cricket Australia now seeking runs, it will be fascinating to see whether the pendulum swings back towards batters.