Should Shane Watson still be opening for Australia: a nation wonders

Post-empire, Australia's self-examination was more lacerating than anything that came from the outside, and now Shane Watson has written an autobiography. It is titled, numbingly, 'Watto'. There's plenty of stuff in it about bowlers who were 'shitting themselves' during the Ashes, but does the book address a more central question: should Shane Watson be opening for Australia?

There is an easy answer for white-ball cricket: he is a man who can induce a queasy kind of awe. But as a Test match batsman, he moved there out of expediency and his decline has been camouflaged by the entropy all around him. Australia's future definition may be hazy at its edges, but focus should sharpen at the top. Shane is just not cutting it.

Watson's batting is a kind of brutalist modernism, as heavy as concrete and about as subtle. In the Summer of 2010, during the warm-ups before an ODI at the Rose Bowl, he came to the boundary edge for some throw-downs, wearing a single pad and a pair of gloves. He began belting the ball back past the coach like the school bully slapping a fat kid's neck. It was impressive, superficially, until Ricky Ponting came over to do the same thing. Ponting didn't strike the ball quite as hard, but he played each shot differently, angling the blade of his bat in such a way that a graph of his shots would have looked like the lines drawn on a protractor. It was the difference between putting a wrecking ball through a wall and undermining its foundations.

Incrementally, Watson's methods have failed him. His Test average is declining and is now below 40. He has made two hundreds in 54 innings. Phil Hughes, his much-maligned partner, averages half a run more - 39.73 to 39.43 - and his average is climbing. He has three centuries from 24 innings.

Those stats are blunt yet revealing, and need digging into. Watson's last Test before he began opening was at Brisbane against New Zealand in November 2008. He went in at number seven behind Hayden, Katich, Ponting, Hussey, Clarke and Symonds. He scored one and five, and his average hit its lowest point, 19.76. He had made one half-century in 13 innings.

He opened for the first time at Edgbaston in the third Ashes Test of 2009. He averaged 48 in that series, with three half-centuries, did even better against West Indies and Pakistan the following Australian summer, averaging 52.60 and 69.20 and making his maiden hundred. He slipped in New Zealand, averaging 38.50 in a single Test, then again against Pakistan in England, averaging 16.00, before playing wonderfully in India, with a second hundred and an average of 67.75 in two Tests. He averaged 48.33 in the Ashes of 2010-11 but with no century, and then made 87 runs at 17.40 in Sri Lanka. His overall average peaked at 42.11 against England in December 2010, and has slipped away since then.

Of his 2040 Test match runs, 1164 have come in boundaries, and he has been dismissed between 50 and a hundred 14 times in 49 innings. These are the stats of a player who has been worked out. When the field is up, he can score in boundaries. Once he is set, and teams are less attacking, he struggles to work the ball around and becomes frustrated.

Australia, with two openers averaging under 40 and with five hundreds between them, compare badly to the sides ranked ahead of them. India have Sehwag - 52.26/22 100s, and Gambhir - 48.34/nine 100s; South Africa have Smith - 49.71/22, albeit paired of late with the mystifying Peterson - 33.64/1; and England have Andrew Strauss - 41.98/19 and Alastair Cook - 49.72/19. And Australia, let's remember, dropped Simon Katich - 45.03/10 and who as an opener alone averaged 50.48 with eight centuries - figures better than Watson and Hughes combined.

Not every great opener qualifies as a great batsman, but every truly great team has had a great opening partnership. Hughes has the capacity to score big hundreds and bats unfathomably; he is an outlier in terms of technique, and there is an X-factor about him. Watson carries none of that, and yet he is a potentially devastating all-rounder if deployed more conventionally.

It may dent his ego to move, as he spends a lot of his time talking about how much he wants to open, but at heart he is a beta-male, deferential, scared of ghosts. Pitched as a Gilchrist figure who bowls instead of keeps wicket, all of that can be dealt with, and as a cricketer he can be fulfilled. At the top of the order, by the highest standards, he is an also-ran.

Michael Clarke and the New Hyperbole

It has always been one of the pleasures of cricket that it is a sport with a written literary history. It is a game with a cerebral, emotional and aesthetic hinterland; it has depth and soul. It eschews hype, partly because it unwinds slowly. Its greatest and most resonant deeds take time. This is important because it gives the game a context, a frame into which everything can fit.

It's not as simple as the distinction between an explosive, short-duration sport and a lengthier, more complex one. Boxing and football fall into the former category and yet one has a noble literary lineage and the other has The Sun. The relentless hyping of football has been to its detriment; the game lacks a language with which to describe itself properly. Within its narrow paradigms, the players and commentators flounder. None seem capable of uttering a useful thought. They communicate in bursts of hysterical cliches which narrow their worldview. In a place with no nuance, everything happens at fever pitch.

Cricket's most reductive form, T20, attracts hype, but it's ringfenced by the rest of the game, from the meanderings of county cricket to the ferocity and indelible greatness of Tests.

It's probably appropriate that Australia's much-hyped 'modern' captain, Michael Clarke, hit the slippery slope when he described Shane Watson's slogathon as 'probably the best innings I've ever seen'. Not seen a lot of cricket then, Michael?

Watson's skill can't be denied, and yet, thuddingly, it lacks any context, coming in a meaningless ODI against a weak attack, a few days after a limited overs tournament of genuine grandeur was settled by an innings of substance from MS Dhoni. Cricinfo had it exactly right when they aligned Watson's knock with Jason Gillespie's double-hundred against the same opposition. Watson's deed is only diminished by Clarke's offhand hype.

Clarke, as he well knows, has probably seen scores of better innings. This one was an inevitable product of the new age and it will be repeated soon enough, something that truly great innings can never be.

Watto: Weirder than first thought

While it's not exactly the ECB's Black Ops analysis department, Opta, best known for their who-kicked-it- to-who data in footie, have produced some Ashes stuff [you can download it here, or if that doesn't work, there's a Guardian link here]. It's quite blunt, but [provided it's correct] it does illuminate the differences between Shane Watson and the rest of the world.

Opta have broken down the balls faced by each batsmen into 'defensive shots' and 'attacking shots', which is subjective in itself but does allow a rough calculation of productivity or effectiveness. For example, Alastair Cook faced 1,438 balls, of which he played no shot to 245, defended 436 and attacked 757, scoring 766 runs. Now, he will have missed some of the balls that he played at, and he would have scored a proportion of his runs from defensive shots, but for argument's sake if you divide the number of runs scored by the number of attacking shots played, you get a rather unscientific but interesting ratio of 1.01. This represents a 'productivity' of 1.01 runs per attacking shot.

Here are some of the batters [in order: runs scored, balls left, balls defended, balls attacked, run ratio]:

Mike Hussey: R 570 B 1085 BL 276 BD 301 BA 508 RR 1.12

Jonathan Trott: R 445 B 883 BL 162 BD 259 BA 462 RR 0.96

Kevin Pietersen: R 360 B 563 BL 102 BD 134 BA 327 RR 1.10

Brad Haddin: R 360 B 656 BL 71 BD 242 BA 343 RR 1.05

Ian Bell: R 329 B 586 BL 139 BD 174 BA 273 RR 1.20

Michael Clarke: R 193 B 437 BL 85 BD 142 BA 210 RR 0.92

Now here's

Shane Watson: R 435 B 903 BL 247 BD 336 BA 320 RR 1.35

What's apparent, however blunt the data, is that Watson is batting differently, or at least achieving different results, to the other effective top-order batsmen in the series. He attacked significantly less deliveries than anyone else - 35.44 per cent, compared to a high of Pietersen's 58.08, and a low of Hussey's 46.82 and Bell's 46.59, but scored far more heavily when he did [The only batsmen who attacked a higher percentage of deliveries than Pietersen were in the lower order: Matt Prior at 63.98 and Mitchell Johnson at 60.29, for run ratios of 1.22 and 0.97 respectively].

Watson's ratios don't really compare to the other openers, either:

Alastair Cook: R 766 B 1438 BL 245 BD 436 BA 757 RR 1.01

Andrew Strauss: R 307 B 592 BL 194 BD 155 BA 243 RR 1.25

Phil Hughes: R 97 B 250 BL 51 BD 96 BA 103 RR 0.94

Simon Katich: R 97 B 207 BL 54 BD 59 BA 94 RR 1.03

Although Strauss is the player who comes closest to Watson's runs per attacking shot ratio, he still attacked 41. 05 per cent of the balls he faced - far higher than Watson - and it was obvious throughout the series that there was an [admirable] intent to lead from the front in Strauss's batting.

Watto, then, played differently. The supposition would be that he hit a higher percentage of boundaries than anyone else - answer: maybe [runs scored, runs in boundaries, percentage of runs scored in boundaries]:

Cook: R 766 RiB 330 = 43.08%

Prior: R 252 RiB 112 = 44.44%

Trott: R 445 RiB 208 = 46.74%

Haddin: R 360 RiB 170 = 47.22%

Hussey: R 570 RiB 286 = 50.17%

Strauss: R 307 RiB 162 = 52.76%

Watson: R 435 RiB 234 = 53.79%

Pietersen: R 360 RiB 206 = 57.22%

Watson's percentage of dot balls to deliveries faced, at 78.63%, was also far higher than any other successful batsman in the series. Strauss was nearest at 76.35%, Pietersen was, at 70.87%, the lowest. Significantly, Watto also featured in three run-outs.

While the differences between batters might not seem huge, they are significant. They seem to back up the view that Watson is not great in two areas that might really improve his game: revolving the strike and working the ball around. His defensive shots especially don't appear to result in as many singles as most other batsmen's. The Black Ops people would probably add all of this kind of stuff together with the wagon wheels of where Watson does score his runs - anecdotally with lots of booming drives. In all, it makes him pretty easy to work out, and leaves him open to the 'bowling machine batsman' accusation.

Watto has many virtues. For a converted opener he gets himself a start on a significant number of occasions and he leaves the ball well. Assuming that early in his innings the fields are up, thus allowing him plenty of boundaries when he does attack, perhaps he gets stuck when the fields become more defensive and he can't knock the ball around as effectively as most other players. That may explain his tendency to get out for around the same score a lot of the time.

That's presuming that the stats are right, obviously...

Brightness falls

On the radio commentary from Port Elizabeth today, Simon Mann was talking about England's batting for the Test series [well come on, the ODIs are like so over, aren't they?] and floated the idea that with KP coming back, Jonathan Trott might be persuaded to open to allow Ian Bell to continue in the side at the expense of Alistair Cook.

England and the English have long been susceptible to this kind of thinking, where square pegs are hammered firmly into round holes with a kind of tortured expediency. It's an England kind of thing. What it's not is an Australian kind of thing. Instead, it's the kind of thing Australians used to laugh at England for doing. 

But at the moment, Ricky Ponting seems to be the only man there who's seeing things clearly. He wants Shane Watson -an expedient, but defendable emergency selection in England - to join Australia's middle order where he so patently belongs [or at least, where he so patently deserves the chance to prove that he belongs]. Punter's aware that, to open in Test cricket, it's best to be an opener. Australia's order, after so many years of Langer and Hayden, has Katich, a converted number three, and Watson. Hussey, an opener, bats four. 

Hughes, an opener [and what's more the sort of opener, like Sehwag and Dilshan, who may redefine the job] was dropped because he kept getting out in the same fashion. Well now so does Watson. 

Australia's selectors were once consistent to a point that extended beyond ruthlessness. No more. An easy series against the West Indies will compound rather than eliminate the problem. They should think about starting again with Ricky Ponting and a blank sheet of paper.

Brief Encounter

Idling along High Street Kensington today, just out of the tube station and heading slightly against the tide, I glanced up and thought, 'Oh, that bloke looks like Shane Watson'. Then I realised it was Shane Watson, in a cheery yellow T-shirt. Skulking along next to him, looking like his sidekick in a grey T-shirt and baseball hat, was the captain of Australia, RT Ponting. 

Having spent most of the summer watching them play, it seemed strangely normal to see them walking up the street. I almost nodded hello before I remembered I don't actually know them.

A few minutes later came Mike Hussey, who was uttering the sentence, 'just ask Alex to get them for you' to his mate. Who Alex is and what s/he can get will forever remain a mystery...