2nd Test preview with Matthew Hayden! Can England bounce back in Brisbane?

17:31So you wonder what you have to do. But the one thing that I always stuck by is that I had a damn good defence. Like, I could trust the bounce of wickets growing up here at the Gabby. you know if we see any way like what we saw in Perth go on at the Gabba it might not even go two days so trusting in my defense was part of that imposing I'm still going to be here fellas so it meant that I could go through the gears really nicely if I've got one regret it'd be that I didn't I didn't back my defense enough in England like I made so many runs in county cricket But just batting normally, not actually trying at all to be an attacking player.

18:17And yet when it came to test match cricket, I just felt that that was my natural role that I played. And it didn't quite work. So I wish I could have that, you know, to get those periods of time back.

18:28Nas:On the back of that, do you see, and without being in our day, but we all batted in the top order, some better than others. Do you see a demise in batting techniques generally across the world? I know Kevin Peterson has had a bit to say with that with test match scores and how quick games are progressing. Or do you see the ball doing more, better bowlers? Why do you see top three in particular? Root wants to bat four, Smith, Shubham and Gill, they all like to bat at four. What's happening in top three in world cricket? You see, the ICC rated this Perth wicket very good. Now, I don't know what you fellas think, but I'm not sure that was a very good wicket.

19:04Do you agree with Usman Khawaja? I think there is a... I understand what Osmond was trying to say in so far as how many test matches have you seen that many wickets fall in that few amount of balls and overs. But it could have been better timed. That's the reality of it. If you asked Travis Head the same question, what would he say? So you have to always be careful. The job of the match referees, and I was trying to explain this to someone this morning, they've got certain metrics they hit. they've got bounce tests they've got moisture readings they've got a bunch of different dynamic measurements which allows them to make that sort of decision but coming back to the question is the bear technique able to sustain periods of pressure on wickets that are just harvesting a little bit of movement with the new ball and the answer is clearly no and i my my theory on this from a batting point of view is that the wanger is not allowing that's the yeah The machine that throws down a million miles an hour.

20:07Not the word you used to call me when I was batting. Close, but no cigar. Yeah, I just don't think it's allowing players enough time to move their feet. So what I see in a lot of modern day batting techniques is guys making their initial balance step. It might be a little push across. Mine is like a little push into the ball. But then they don't move a second time. And I feel that's a lot to do with just relying heavily on...

20:36Ath:So you'd like to see them on the natural arm swing so you can then get the rhythm of when the ball are out. Well, Athos, as you know, mate, it's a rhythm game. I mean, once you're in rhythm, it's hard to get out of it. Once you're out of rhythm, it's hard to get into it. And if you're being forced to make decisions, because it's a decision-making game and you've got whatever it is, 0.2 of a second, I just feel like these things at the moment are too much reliance on them, as opposed to seeing the cues. I mean, a bowler will give you evidence. I mean, the number of times that you look at a fast bowler and you go, that's going to be short.

21:09I mean, you've got to read the room. If you just smack someone through mid-wicket for four, a bowler's going to be f***ed off enough to actually find the centre of the track as a common rule of fast bowling. So, yeah, I think they're probably, when you look at that session on the second day where England were in effect one for 100, a tiny bit of match awareness and a bit more positioning of the game through a little bit more of a calculated risk. And Australia are finished. You've won your one up in that case. So the match awareness piece, playing so much T20 cricket as it transfers over to the longer format of the game.

21:47And maybe it's even a bit of fear. Like I said on air at the time with Seven that if I'd played a shot like Harry Brook did ahead of that lunch break to Mitchell Stark. I would have been met by Alan Border at the top of the race to say, son, if you ever play that shot again, I'm telling you you'll never play for Australia.

22:08Ath:It's interesting because it's completely the other way with this England team at the moment. Harry Brook, if you spoke to him he'd say, well it's McCollum and Stokes that have allowed me the freedom to do that because they don't point the finger if it goes wrong. I guess there's a balance to be had somewhere along the line. Well, he's such a good player. He looked head and heels above, I thought, the other English batters. Just the amount of time that he has the class. Surely he himself would want his own test to be longer, a prolonged batting performance. And I guarantee you that if he had just a bit more capacity to absorb pressure, then I honestly believe we'd be looking at a different result.

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23:50Nas:There is a switch you can flip though. I mean, the mantra of McCullum is run towards danger. So when it is doing a little bit early on, I do quite like their attacking put bowlers. I think that's where Ducky in particular is excellent. He puts opening bowlers under pressure. But when you get ahead of the game, as they were at lunch on day two, as they have been on a number of occasions, that is not the time to run towards danger because the danger is just drifting away. Now's the time to be ruthless and go back to let them come to us. And that's why I ask you, when it's nipping around under lights here, right?

24:22Nas:England's mentality of run towards danger, play more shots. What do you think of that? Should they be a little bit more, right, we've got to be careful here because it ebbs and flows, doesn't it, day-night cricket in Australia or in general, there are periods where you may have to give the opposition a little bit or do you put them back under pressure? Well, see, I used to bat with a partner called Trevor Barsby up here in Queensland and his theory was to collapse the back leg and swing as hard as you possibly could. as soon as it started getting green. And I'll tell you, it was amazing how often he would get through that ugly little patch by fighting fire with fire, and then he'd come out the back of it and get big runs.

25:03And I learned a lot from Trevor over the years because that was sort of the seed that started to plant from me being quite a defensive player and then running into the danger spot of having little counter-punching periods. But I'm saying little counter-punching periods.

25:16Nas:Sorry to interrupt. I played with Stuart Law at Essex a lot. And the more it did, Stuart said, I'm going to get some before they get me. Whereas us were a bit fearful. And, you know, eventually you nick off when it's doing a bit. The Duke's ball in May. Stewie had this opinion of I've got to get some before. And it was amazing how in domestic cricket, when he put bowlers under pressure, they would miss their length. They would bowl a half volley. They'd be taken out the attack. But it's getting that balance right. After lunch, as we've talked about a lot, day two, they were ahead. they you know they needed australia to to work hard and they didn't they gave some just a little start well end well i mean it's something that you even if you apply that to the rest of your life if you start your day nicely and end your day nicely chances are you're having a pretty good day so you know i think it's always worth just going you know what just to let my eyes adjust just feel out the conditions again it might be you know you might have come off for rain you know assessing the conditions, it might be like a four or even five over period where you just go, I've got to start to shift gears back again.

26:19You don't see a Ferrari plummeting around a corner at 350 miles an hour. You know, they have to back off. They have to go through gears and go up gears. And that's batsmanship. That's why it takes so long to learn this great game, because you are exposed to many corners in a cricketing career. England right now have a corner of note, because the last time he won here, I think... 86-7. It was when Brodie had the winning runs. Not the Brodie in the country. No, absolutely. Farther off, yeah. I'll be reminding him of that this week.

26:49Ath:We're all happily retired, I assume now. Has been. I was just thinking about... How good were we, though? Well, I was thinking about Zach Crawley and what he's going through right now. He's sitting on a pair. He's about to face the best bowler with the pink ball that there's ever been. I mean, do you have empathy for that situation? If you were in his position now, how would you be approaching that? I mean, you know, it's easy to sit here and say, well, what a great challenge it would be. But it's hard, isn't it, when you're on the back of a pair? The hardest thing is to go back into your box.

27:24That's never going to work. So he's got to just find his natural tempo. I mean, I mentioned Trevor Barsby as someone that had, you know, a certain method. I mean, my own method was to wear down a bowler at the Gabba. I mean, literally, the moment that I started thinking playing square of the wicket here, I would get out. That's why I didn't have a great cut shot, because I'd think cut, and before I knew it, second slip had it in his hand. So you kind of learn to work out where your percentages are, and Zach is a natural striker of the ball. But I don't think if I was coaching Zach, I'd be asking him to do that in the first 30 or 40 minutes.

28:02Even when you look at Travis Head the other day, we'll all remember his swashbuckling innings in the WACA. We might even say that it's in the top five of all time. But you'll never remember the work that he did in the shadows in the lead-up to that great attacking spree, and that is that he had 20 balls at least where he just absorbed pressure. Unfortunately for us buff removers, our job is to let the interior decorators of the team, the four, fives and six, Basically, every batter that wants to bat there goes there because they're better players than us.

28:34Ath:Are we right in thinking... I mean, Usman has just failed a fitness test. Are we right in thinking that Travis will open and Inglis will come in the middle order? Yeah, because they haven't changed their squad. So I was thinking that, you know, a Renshaw that's got 300s already in domestic cricket. Look, Hedy, mate, he just mounted such a compelling case in that innings. And the fact that he wants to do it, it might change after this innings were zipping around under the lights with the new ball with serious velocity. As Smudgy did, he'd had an opportunity to open. He had a quick go at it. The old yes, no, wait.

29:10It was a no.

29:11Ath:I'll slide back into the middle order, get the juicy lollipops. Is he the best all-format player at the moment, Travis Head, going?

29:19Nas:You keep changing. Every time Harry Brook goes out to bat in England, you just change with which country you're in. It's going pretty well. When you're in India, it's about Kohli. when you come to Australia, you just play the audience. In England, it's Harry Brooke. Well, on the back of that, although leading up to that game, he'd had a run of low scores, actually, by his standards. But he doesn't strike me as someone that worries about that sort of stuff. But he has that attacking instinct. But as he just said, he's also a very smart cricketer. And he seems to rise. That's what you want. Because he's not a complicated lad, or doesn't seem to it, you put him in a World Cup final.

29:54Nas:and the occasion doesn't get to him. You put him in that run chase on a pitch where wickets are falling aplenty and he rises to the occasion. I think that's almost more important at the highest level is what sort of character you are and he's the sort of character you want in your team. I think of someone like Lord Botham. He was a generational player that could just shift a game. That's Travis Head in this generation now. can shift gears, shift momentum. And everyone knows that when he came out of the race the other day at the WACA, I was looking very closely at the body language of England and they literally had fractured necks.

30:34They just turned their head around and they just couldn't believe that he was coming out. And I suppose that old theory of throw at the opposition, something that they would least rather, is exactly Travis Head. But you guys have got so many counteracting players as well.

30:49Ath:Great despondency after that game in England, obviously. Two-day defeat. Yeah. Everybody pretty down in the dumps. But how do you see it now? I mean, are you still reasonably optimistic for a competitive series? You think England have got it in them to be competitive? And what I've liked is they've actually stuck to their process. There'd be a lot of comments around how they prepared. But going down to Marnica Oval, for example, I think was a lost cause for this team that had been beaten. and beaten really only in one session, by the way. You know, it's not like... I know the end result was very negative.

31:25Ath:There was a picture of Jacob Bethel and a few of the guys in the dugout the other night huddling under a blanket at Marnica. It was about, you know, 15 degrees or something. It's 32 degrees here. Totally different conditions. And also, when you get in the nets here at this beautiful ground, they are almost identical to the middle. Like, it's the best place to rehearse your cricket. And it's such a unique venue that you just need to have time. Like I said before, if you start thinking square of the wicket, like the great Billy Brown gave me a great piece of advice when I first started playing here.

31:59We're going back many years, but, you know, one of the greats of all time. He said, son, if I'm seeing your maker's name, you're going to make runs. That's how you're a successful opener. You know, that is how you play here. You can't be just dabbling with, you know, half horizontal vertical bats. You've got to be solid up here. And I think you guys actually have got quite a good game against short pitch bowling as well. Because as you know, the bounce here is so perfect. I remember taking on bowlers here with serious velocity only because you could trust exactly where the ball is going to be.

32:34Nas:What about pink ball tests in general? Atherton has just said, no, not for me. Joe Root, not for me. What do you think about pink ball tests? And in Australia, I know they've not played many here, but in general at the Gabba, is it phases of play that will suddenly start zipping around? It will be. Yeah, it will be. It'll be, you know, in a one-day cricket, how you get that twilight period, that's a period as a batsman you don't really want to be, you know, in that contest. The bowler's got the advantage. So, again, it's just going through a gear. What is that gear? I don't think it's necessarily just going defensive, but by the same token, and I'll mention it, half shots that we saw, you know, out here with that sort of bat angle is pretty average.

33:17You've still got to be up in here. Or leaving the ball. I mean, in that period, you might have an hour where you go, okay, guys, bowlers away here. Knock me over, but it's going to have to be a good ball. But generally, it's a bowlers game. And do I like it? I like parts of it. I like the fact that someone can come from work, literally just behind us here, walk for half an hour and take on Test cricket.

33:46Ath:But it's going to be, it would be sold out anyway, wouldn't it? For an Ashes match. It would be. So, look, new ways, I'm not a fan of it. I understand why it is, but I still love the traditions of Test cricket. And the red ball is something that is special to Test cricket. There's way too much advantage, in my opinion, with pink ball. And generally, Australian cricket is quite an ageing side, obviously. What's the general strength of Australian cricket look like now compared to, say, I mean, we don't like to talk about back in the day, but you mentioned that AFL is quite dominant, quite strong compared to cricket.

34:28Ath:What's the general strength of Australian cricket like? Are you optimistic about its future? Very optimistic. You know, you can't coach athletic ability. And the one thing that a diversity of our sporting landscape does provide is wonderfully agile, fit human beings that can kind of retrospectively fit into different codes. See, it's pretty simple here because the weather is so good. You play footy in the winter and you play cricket in the summer. And when you're not doing either of those, you go swimming. And you mostly swim to save your life as well, as I've done on several occasions. So you've got to be darn good at it.

35:05Mr Fergal Sharky in his grey suit will come along and give you a nibble. It usually was a toothpick, Nass.

35:12Nas:I'd be decent feed, Athers. And what about you? You've done everything. Nothing beats playing, I'm guessing, but you've coached and you've coached Pakistan. You're now a broadcaster. What has given you away from cricket, what has given you the most pleasure, would you say? Away from playing cricket. Look, I think endless days of summer up here are just magic. Out on the island, fishing. We've got this beautiful beachfront property, which we've just taken advantage of. But, you know, we're all on this great journey of cricket. I mean, it's hard not to be involved in the game. It's sort of part of your DNA.

35:48It gets to a point where it doesn't necessarily define who you are, but we just align to so many things within the game. The travel, I still love to travel, Nass. I mean to go over to India, Pakistan where I gave you a solid lesson on all the crops of the region I thought he was going to lose his you know what about three hours in you okay Nass no but to meet I think to meet and spend time now without the pressure of the game is still very special and I love broadcasting I mean the analytics of the game are one thing but we've got so many stories that we can tell and so many great memories that we can lean into and it's all based around you had young broad next to you the other day as all those wickets were tumbling

36:37Ath:and could be a long summer ahead for him yeah look i got what he said i mean i thought i thought that he explained you know the 2010 as being the best english side and he said something very accurate and that is that england will always have to play extraordinary well and australia will have to do something really, really bad. And guess what? We actually did both in the same game, right? Amazing. So you do have a big chance. I'm really optimistic that if England can just have the confidence to stick at their process, and in spite of the obvious result in the first Test match, bounce back with a confidence that they're not doing things dreadfully wrong, then I'm telling you this side and Brodie is right it can be more fragile than you think and you know we're going to face all sorts of conditions this this summer this will be your most challenging test match but you can get on the wrong side of this test match because the home advantage to the Australian side is no longer really a home advantage they rarely play up here and they don't like it with their techniques either you know so this free-flowing style that you see from Travis Head, it could be very different, you know, come this test match.

37:54Ath:And it's got to get easier for batters as we go. Adelaide next. Back-to-back games, Melbourne, Sydney. Tough for the bowlers. Test match coming quickly. So if you're a batter, get through this one and then the sunlit uplands ahead of you. You picked a spinner. I think that's a good... They've gone for Will Jacks, which is an interesting call. I think it's the right call myself. I think it's quite a strategic call for this test match. Yeah, it's conservative, isn't it, as a spinner? I think, you know, from what I understand, Bashir has got a bit more bounce and a bit more sort of overspin on the ball.

38:28But I suppose you're wanting... I always feel with England that you have a lot of cover selections. You know, where you get into a position where you go, well, it'd be handy to have a bit of that, but you sort of need a bit of this as well. But Jax, I think, I was always worried about four quicks. It's never really worked for Australia. and I don't think it's necessarily ever worked for an overseas side as well. That's our strength. Our weakness and our Achilles heel is spin. I mean, you saw that in the lead-up to this game against India. You had Aksar Patel bowling, Baron Chakravarti with his mystery spin and look, we just don't...

39:05I don't think we find the way as well through that navigating quality spin is what we do when we're playing quicks. We might be vulnerable for the first 20 or 30 minutes but then most Australian kids have been brought up their entire lives playing quicks.

39:20Ath:Well, it's great to see you. Thanks for coming up to the penthouse here. You're off to the Gabba tonight, aren't you? Is it an Isha Kua function? I have, yeah. I've got Isha's function, yeah, for her foundation. AB's coming as well. And Smokes. I haven't seen Adam Hollyo for a long time either. He's living out here in the ice. So looking forward to that, yeah. We'll give AB our best. I will. Essex legend, of course. Yeah, well, we'll see you in the next few days. Let's hope for more than a two-day game this time. Shall I bring some hankies or...?