CMJ: Gough injury tips the balance further in Australia`s favour (7 Aug 1997)

Thursday 7 August 1997

Gough injury tips the balance further in Australia`s favour

Christopher Martin-Jenkins.

ON what is the truest and driest, although also the most thickly grassed pitch of the series so far, England take on Australia over the next five days in a Test they have to win without their best fast bowler. Darren Gough needed only two half-hearted balls yesterday to know that his injured left knee was still sufficiently sore to keep him out of the fifth Test, starting at Trent Bridge today.

With 16 wickets he is comfortably the leading wickettaker for England in the series to date and his withdrawal - he hopes to play this weekend to prove his fitness for the Oval - deprives the home side of the only bowler to have taken his Test wickets against Australia at less than 30.

Nothing points more obviously to the likely result than the disparity between Australia`s bowling averages against England - Jason Gillespie 16, Paul Reiffel 20, Shane Warne 24 and Glenn McGrath 25 - and England`s remaining specialists against Australia: Dean Headley 30, Devon Malcolm 44, Phil Tufnell 46, Andrew Caddick 51 and Robert Croft 53.

It would be a pleasant change to see Tufnell and Croft at last resuming what looked a promising spin partnership in the winter but once again this looks a surface better suited to bowlers who hit the seam hard and often. The thickness of the grass should not only help the ball go through at a decent pace but also allow lateral movement off the seam, but the stability and quality of the strip suggests, too, that batsmen who get a start will enjoy themselves, if not quite as much as the Sri Lankans have just done in Colombo.

They say of Steve Birks, who moved from Derby to be the new groundsman at Trent Bridge, that he can produce almost any sort of pitch. In fact there was sufficient life here last year when India`s opening bowlers, Javagal Srinath and Venkatesh Prasad, were bowling with a new ball, to make the opening stand of 130 between Mike Atherton and Alec Stewart one of the more remarkable in their generally successful partnership.

The captain and his former deputy have opened together in only two Test matches since, Nick Knight and Mark Butcher having gone in first with Atherton in the 13 other games played since. It is too late now for the selectors to have second thoughts about discarding the increasingly confident, and preciously left-handed, Butcher. Whether Stewart will be able to raise his game and save them from repenting at leisure will depend on his own determination to rise above the mixture of looseness, bad judgment and ill luck which has contributed to his average of 15 in the four Tests to date.

Atherton, too, is due an authoritative innings after a curiously anonymous series with the bat. The theory of not overdoing the matchplay, inherent in the blueprint for next year, will get an interesting test in his performance here. He has not played since the fourth Test, so his net practice has been even more assiduous than usual, with Graham Gooch as his guide. Four of his 11 Test hundreds have been scored at Trent Bridge, two of them in the last two Tests here.

Glenn McGrath has undermined both Atherton and Stewart with the short ball which he directs with such lethal straightness at just the right height to pose the instant question: to hook or not to hook. England need a lead from Atherton which is positive as well as solid and their best hope is to bat first and score sufficiently quickly to enable the four specialist bowlers to hustle the Australians into mistakes with the bat.

At Old Trafford and Headingley, Australia`s controlled aggression, based on correct, simple batting technique and accuracy with the ball, restored their briefly shaken supremacy. Everyone made a significant contribution with bat or ball except Mark Taylor, who remembers Trent Bridge fondly for his 219 in 1989, and Mark Waugh, who becomes more overdue his second Test hundred in England with every game that passes. Taylor needs only 61 to join the five other Australians who have scored 6,000 Test runs. Steve Waugh, from eight more Tests, needs another 157 to reach the same landmark.

It must be long odds against the Hollioakes upstaging the Waughs again, as they did in their different ways in the oneday internationals, but both will relish the challenge. Assuming Ben plays, and it seems a safe assumption because England`s tail would otherwise start at No 7, they will be the first brothers to play together for England since Peter and Dick Richardson in 1957. It is the first instance of brothers making their debuts for England in the same match since two of the Hearnes (A and G G) did so in South Africa 105 years ago.

Adam is 25 and hoping that he will do well enough both to spark his colleagues, as he did earlier in the season, and to prove that he is a batsman of genuine Test quality. This is his first duty but he is also capable of picking up useful wickets as an occasional purveyor of crafty medium pace and, sooner or later, of becoming a Test captain.

Ben, at 19, is the youngest England player since Brian Close in 1949 and only the second teenager. A total of 359 firstclass runs at 32 and 11 wickets at 34 from eight first-class games this season is a flimsy record on which to win a Test cap. With close catchers in attendance whenever he starts his innings the languid freedom with which he batted, in those two big one-day games at Lord`s which earned him his selection, will not be so easily exercised.

Even more is being taken on trust in his bowling. He does not look, as the young Ian Botham did in 1977, to have an action of sufficient quality to become a prodigious taker of Test wickets, nor does he yet look to have the physique to stand up to long spells. But he does look a special cricketer and we must hope that he is also a lucky one.

England (from)

* M A Atherton, - A J Stewart, J P Crawley, N Hussain, G P Thorpe, A J Hollioake, B C Hollioake, R D B Croft, A R Caddick, D W Headley, P C R Tufnell, D E Malcolm.

Australia:

* M A Taylor, M T G Elliott, G S Blewett, M E Waugh, S R Waugh, R T Ponting, - I A Healy, S K Warne, P R Reiffel, J N Gillespie, G D McGrath.

Umpires: D R Shepherd & C J Mitchley (South Africa).

Third umpire: A A Jones.

Match referee: C W Smith (West Indies).

Source :: The Electronic Telegraph (https://www.telegraph.co.uk/)