Much as it goes against the grain to lavish more praise on Australia’s cricketers, it must be said that there may never have been a better team of outfielders than the ones who are sweeping all before them Down Under at the moment.
Of all cricket’s disciplines, fielding was traditionally viewed as the one most susceptible to chance, but the Australians, with the help of their American fielding coach, Mike Young, have turned it into the most thorough science, something the England Ashes inquiry committee might like to dwell on when it contemplates where English cricket goes next.
As if the sustained excellence of the bowling has not been enough, England’s beleaguered batsmen have faced the challenge of getting the ball through a wall of athletic close fielders capable of patrolling 15 yards of turf each.
On their last tour of India, the favourite song in the England dressing room was Ring Of Fire; now they are confronted by one out on the pitch. There have been times when they must have seriously wondered where their next run was coming from in the face of near-perfect displays of stopping, throwing and general harrying.
Friday’s day-nighter at the Gabba was a case in point. Australia did not necessarily field much better than on other recent occasions, but the pressure their fielders created sucked the light out of England’s bright start faster than a black hole.
In a low-scoring game, the part played by Australia’s fielders was particularly important — two brilliant catches, both by Brad Hodge, an inspired run-out by Cameron White and about 35 runs saved through fielding interventions.
On the debit side was one inexpensive dropped catch by Matthew Hayden, one run lost to a misfield by Hodge off the second ball of the day and another lost to slow work by Glenn McGrath in the deep.
One of the features of this tour has been the passages of play, usually crucial periods when they sensed there was something to be gained by tightening the screw, when Australia raised the intensity of their fielding to rare heights.
They did this most memorably on the final days of the Tests in Adelaide, when England ticked along at little more than one run per over, and in Sydney, when Australia knew the whitewash was close and did not want England’s tail wagging. It did not so much wag as fall off, as tigerish fielding allowed only two scoring shots in the first nine overs of the day.
England similarly felt the steely grip of Australian hands on their throat in the first one-dayer in Melbourne, with runs desperately hard to come by in mid-innings.
Paul Collingwood was nearly run out three times and should have been caught in the deep but for a schoolboy error by the usually dependable White in not wearing sunglasses.
But the general standard of catching was high, with Ricky Ponting taking a blinder, stretching full length at wide gully, to remove Jon Lewis.
Friday’s catastrophe — five top-order wickets lost in eight overs — was therefore not a great surprise once the second victim, Andrew Strauss, had fallen to another brilliant effort, this time a run-and-dive catch by Hodge. From that point, any single England took was going to be a hair-raising adventure. Sure enough, Ian Bell was caught ball-watching — again — as he lingered to see whether the fielding ring had been breached. Fat chance.
Australia have long been athletic outfielders, thanks in part to the quality of their outfields, but with Young’s help they are leaving the rest of the world, not just England, far behind.
The England coach, Duncan Fletcher, has called on his side to deliver two wickets per innings from an exceptional piece of fielding, but they have not provided here. Largely because of the injury crisis they are enduring, their team contains too many one- dimensional cricketers.
Young, who has brought a fresh mind to fielding from an earlier career coaching baseball, reckons it takes years to refine a good technique based on vision and balance at the moment ball leaves bat.
His fielding drills are very different from the ones undertaken by England, which are generally run in a group environment. Young’s speciality is one-on-one sessions with key ring fielders such as Ponting, Andrew Symonds and Michael Clarke. He gets them to gather the ball with their back to the target, turn and throw at a set of short stumps, behind which is a small net, maybe three feet wide and two feet high. In Bombay, during the Champions Trophy, Ponting and Simon Katich were hitting the net almost every time.
But there is clearly room for improvement. In matches the ever-eager Clarke will throw at the stumps whenever a run is taken or is in the offing, but he rarely hits.
Clarke is certainly nowhere near as accurate as Ponting, who must be the best ground-fielder in the world. Young thinks that Ponting and Symonds would both be good enough fielders for professional baseball.
Young’s innovative thinking is plain in some manoeuvres. White’s run-out of Bell in Brisbane — with a back-handed throw while lying on the ground — may have seemed fortuitous, but the Australians have clearly been practising such throws.
Later in the innings McGrath and Symonds attempted backhanded shies at the stumps off their own bowling, although both missed their targets.
In Bombay, Young — who has worked with England as a freelance but was signed full-time by Australia in 2005 — spoke cryptically of what he called a “design play”, leading to a run-out, that his team was working on.
“We have one or two set plays for each team,” he said. “If they run on this play and we catch the ball, eight out of 10 times they’re out if we hit. I’ll give you a clue. We have to have a left-handed thrower in the ring that can do certain things, though I’m not saying he’s the guy who is going to throw the ball. It’s a left-hander and right-hander working together.”
Some of the moves are almost balletic. In Brisbane, when Symonds and Clarke both swooped towards a ball that had been pushed into the covers, Symonds dropped to the ground in order to clear a path for the left-handed Clarke to throw to the non-striker’s end.
“All teams have improved, but I consider us the No 1 fielding team in the world,” Young said. “It doesn’t happen overnight. These guys have been working for five years and they are getting better and better.
“I’m happy there are more fielding coaches in the game and fielding is now looked at as a major facet of the game. The thing about fielding is that you can always improve. You can’t sit on your laurels.”
He singled out Clarke, Ponting and Symonds as the best ring players, but stressed that their art was different from boundary fielding. He reckons Mitchell Johnson has the strongest arm in world cricket.
England confirmed yesterday that Michael Vaughan will miss the next two one-dayers, in Adelaide against New Zealand on Tuesday and Australia on Friday, because of his hamstring trouble, but he is hoping to be fit for the match against the Kiwis in Perth on January 30. That gives Andrew Flintoff a further two games in charge and also presents at least two more opportunites for Mal Loye to press his case for a World Cup place.
