The team’s awful performance in India has been attributed by Australian great Geoff Lawson to the captain Pat Cummins’ lack of familiarity with spinning tracks and assistant coach Daniel Vettori’s subpar contributions. With their spin-bowling tandem of Ravichandran Ashwin and Ravindra Jadeja causing the most damage, India won the opening two Test matches of the Border-Gavaskar Trophy in just three days. Australia lost the first Test match in Nagpur by an innings and 132 runs, and while they played a bit better in the second game in New Delhi, India still won by six wickets.
The fact that Cummins hasn’t played much Sheffield Shield cricket, according to Lawson, has also prevented the captain from strategizing effectively on turning tracks. Lawson was one of the most feared Australian speed bowlers in Tests and ODIs during the 1980s. “Cummo (Cummins) has so little experience captaining on spinning wickets, in the contemporary game your captain plays very little Sheffield Shield, and he certainly doesn’t play on spinning wickets,” Lawson said on SEN Radio.
“So where does he learn to do all the creative and adaptable things you need to do? He doesn’t, he just gets thrown in the deep end and we watch a lot of videos and make decisions.” With the Border-Gavaskar Trophy successfully retained, India will look to win the third Test in Indore from March 1 to secure a World Test Championship final berth. In the second Test, Lawson claimed that the Australian bowlers lacked a plan for how to end the alliance of lower-order Indian hitters Axar Patel and Ashwin, which helped the hosts gain the upper hand psychologically over the visitors.
In the first Test, Axar hit 84 and Jadeja 70; in the second Test, the former hammered 74 and enjoyed a productive combination with Ashwin (34) to steal the momentum from Cummins’ team. “When Axar Patel (is) having a partnership with (Ravi) Ashwin (in the second Test), we’re not sure how we are going about breaking them down, those couple of partnerships have cost us two Test matches,” added Lawson.
Lawson also took aim at former New Zealand spinner and the current Australia assistant coach Vettori, questioning his inputs to the team’s tweakers. “The man who’s probably not copping as much as he should is Daniel Vettori who is one of the great left-arm orthodox bowlers in the world, but he should be advising on how we’re going to bowl and how we’re going to play against that sort of bowling,” Lawson said. “He seems to have escaped a bit of attention here because when I see shots of the dressing room I think, ‘What’s Vettori’s input here, he’s the man who was a great slow ball’. He should perhaps be having more input than most.”