By baggygreenmania - 31 Dec 2018 9:08 AM
I have been following Test cricket since the late 70s. So I have seen many of our very best cricketers ply their trade. Sure Australian cricket has had its ups and downs..but nothing like what it is going thru at the moment. Leading the way into our despair has been our batting. How many embarrassing collapses has shaped our cricket over the past three years..too many. We are handing nations the game because our batsmen have forgotten.. well how to bat like Test match batsmen. I maintain Australia's dire red ball problems lie in junior cricket. When I coached junior cricket back in the 90s it was all red ball cricket. These days the emphasis is on white ball cricket and getting little Johnny to play T20 Blast..Tho some red ball cricket is still being played at U14 level.. it has evidently taken a back seat to the white ball stuff. All our national Under 15/17/19 championships, part of CA Pathways Program, are limited overs played with the White Kookaburra. Therein lies the root of the problem imho. It has to take the blame for the current parlous state of Australian Test batting. As we all know the emphasis on short format cricket is to score as many runs in the time given as is humanly possible.. There is no urgency by our coaches to teach a boy or a girl how to maintain time at the crease, or use a correct technique..eg; how to defend a ball under your eyeline. Or how to play the cover drive using a hi elbow instead of how to execute a reverse sweep. Instead of being tutored in the use of the feet to counter spin they are tutored in the risky slog sweep. There are simply too many bad habits creeping into cricket during the formative years. This has to change. CA made the problem it alone can fix it.
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By baggygreenmania - 8 Jan 2019 9:45 AM
You know what these Pathway programs, CA contracts etc breeds? Arrogance! We are talking about teenagers here "How good am I, I have a Cricket Pathways contract, I don't need to train, I'm that good". Dedication is seen by the training camps, who is prepared to do hours of additional training, working with bowling machines while the others are mucking around. Who listens to the coaches. These are the players we want. Players are playing currently for that CA contract, doing just enough to maintain that contract, no sign of any improvement in the majority of players. No dedication.
 Mike.
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