Brett Lee must let it rip

Shane Warne, in his Daily Telegraph column, has advised a beleaguered Brett Lee to go into the Boxing Day Test and just let all hell break loose. Lee was well below his match-winning potential in Australia's record loss to South Africa in Perth, and Warne is the latest to give Lee a vote of confidence ahead of the second Test.

Sure bowlers hunt in packs and his partner, Mitchell Johnson, was outstanding in Perth with 11 wickets.That was a great achievement, but Binga is the leader of the pack and he must show it in Melbourne. I want him to let the horses out and consistently hit the 150km/h-plus mark in pace, not hover in the high 130s. Let them have it, Binga.

Warne is also disappointed in some of the speculation and criticism the Australian team received.

In the Sydney Morning Herald, Peter Roebuck notes the rapid rate at which left-handed batsmen are rising to success.

In the 1980s, roughly 23 per cent of Test runs were scored by blokes standing the wrong way around. In the last few years, the figure has shot up to 37 per cent. Apart from the collapse of the Berlin Wall, the ending of apartheid and the emergence of Paris Hilton, nothing much happened in these 20 years, certainly not enough to explain such a discrepancy. And it has only just begun. Within another two decades, the rate will have risen to 60 per cent. By then, the concept of right- and left-handed batting might have undergone a complete overhaul.