INDIA IN AUSTRALIA, 2018-19

The Nathan Lyon effect

by Bharat Sundaresan • Published on

Lyon is widely regarded as the best spinner in the world at the moment. © Getty

When Craig Howard met Nathan Lyon for the first time, the man who would go on to become Australia's most successful off-spinner was still an assistant curator. It was around the time Lyon, still in his early 20s, had shifted base from Canberra to intern under Damian Hough, the Adelaide Oval's head groundsman. Hough though recalls not having been too chuffed about getting a "cricketer" on board. His incumbent assistant had just quit and he didn't want to invest time in training another apprentice, who he wasn't sure of would survive.

Hough, however, doesn't regret one bit about how real his fears about Lyon turned out to be. Funnily enough, he recalls Lyon often trying to belie those very fears by insisting that cricket would never take him too far. These conversations would generally take place over the weekend when Lyon would take a break from his day job tending pitches at Park 25, a subsidiary cricket ground in Adelaide now named the Karen Rolton Oval, and go off to represent his club Prospect in local grade cricket.

It's at Park 25 that Lyon's talent with the ball would first come to the limelight, courtesy former Victoria wicket-keeper turned coach Darren Berry. In later interviews, Berry would reveal how it had taken two deliveries from the "kid who was rolling the pitch for us" for him to identify him as the best off-spinner in the country "since Tim May". Within seven months, Lyon was playing first-class cricket for South Australia and Hough was looking for his latest apprentice.

It's around this time that Howard first met Lyon. The former Victorian spinner had been roped in by his former teammate to work with young spinners in the state. Like Berry, it didn't take Howard too long to recognize the potential in the slender-built off-spinner with the natural ability to get the ball to drift and then turn in sharply upon landing. The two would hit it off immediately and for the next year or so, Howard played a big role in the development of Lyon. But little did he know that in less than five years-by their next meeting at the Adelaide Oval on the eve of the first Test against India-Lyon would be within touching distance of overtaking Dennis Lillee as the third highest wicket-taker in Tests for Australia behind that otherworldly duo-McGrath and Warne.

Howard knew a thing or two about being a young spinner with talent and the spotlight that gets you in Australia. There was a time briefly in the early 1990s when he and Shane Warne were being spoken of in the same breath in Victoria as potential world-beating leg-spinners. Though a year or two younger than his blonde compatriot cum competitor, Howard was making as much of an impact as Warne in local cricket, and for Victoria. At 19, he nearly came close to being handed a shock Test debut but it wasn't to be. It came on the back of an eye-catching performance in a shock win for Victoria against the touring South Africans in December 1993, when Howard returned figures of 5/42, which included the wickets of Jonty Rhodes, Pat Symcox, Brian McMillan and Allan Donald.

His career would nosedive rapidly from that point on. He remained plagued with injuries and his last match for his state came when he was still only 21. Years later, Howard would return as an off-spinner, and even get a look-in by Victoria but he would never go past grade cricket again.

Ironically, the aspect of Howard's leg-spin that he feels held him back is exactly the aspect of Lyon's bowling that has become synonymous with his success-over-spin. While Howard's over-spin never could match up in the long run with Warne's side-spin; Lyon's over-spin has helped him win over the world. And the coach recalls having been impressed with it from the first time he laid eyes on the curator-turned-ace spinner in full flight. Though not much has changed since, there was an immediate need for a slight tweak too back then.

"When we first got a hold of him, he always had a bit of overspin. He ran in with a bit of an angle and had a real high release, might have even gone past the vertical. At some stage, he just drifted in and out. So rather than mess with his arm height, we just got his alignment right, which is getting his feet into the right position, which in turn got his arm into a better position. It just allowed him to curve the ball and drop it," Howard tells Cricbuzz.

"Then it was just about getting a lot of force behind the ball. When you are bowling with overspin, you need a lot of energy and a lot of vigour and a lot of force. Because if you don't, then it tends to come out too slow. He has been able to work on it leading up to Test cricket and not much has changed since he started playing cricket," he adds.

Lyon came up with a man of the match performance in the second Test against India. ©Getty

Not many, including the Indian team, would be surprised by the impact Lyon has already had on the ongoing series. Not even when he walked away with the man-of-the-match award on a green, bouncy, pacy pitch in Perth, where India decided to go in without a specialist spinner for only the third time in their Test history. In fact, Virat Kohli has been talking Lyon up from nearly two months out, about the challenge of facing the Aussie talisman and why he's the archetype for any spinner to be successful Down Under. And it was Lyon's ability to hit the bat hard and high that the Indian captain had highlighted back then-a day prior to India's Test against the West Indies in Hyderabad-and has done so on many occasions since.

Howard puts it down to Lyon's seam position, a facet of bowling dynamics more talked about when it comes to the fast bowlers-take Mohammed Shami or even Sreesanth before him. He also uses this to explain the real definition of flight in terms of a spinner's release.

"I believe you cannot be bowling too fast if you are bowling with the right amount of overspin. The flight is the ball going up and down. Floating it, is making the gravity bring it down, flighting is you are making the ball go up and down at good pace. That is what Kohli is talking about as far as his ability to hit the stick. It is the way the ball drops and bounces, is why it feels like it is hitting the bat hard and higher on the bat. He is hard to get to from a length point of view, because it just drops on you, due to his seam position," he says.

"Personally, I don't think you can bowl too fast with the overspin like Lyono bowls with. A lot of spinners around the world, even leg spinners tend to bowl with a lot of overspin, even their stock balls are around 90kmph and they are in white ball cricket. Most spinners will accelerate through their release as fast as they can, the pace of the ball will be decided by the gift in your fingers and wrists, as far as how many revolutions you are able to put on the ball," he further adds. Howard also reveals how Lyon's rapid success also can be attributed to his ability to change his seam position based on the need of the pitch he's bowling on. He can go from keeping it horizontal to upright to even scrambled, like James Anderson does.

There are also a lot of experts, including Kohli, who have felt that Lyon's strength also lies in the pace at which he bowls at. "It's the pace on the ball that puts you in doubt," the Indian captain had said in Hyderabad. But according to Howard, the pace on the ball when a spinner releases it is heavily dependent on the seam position again. The "arm speed" that a spinner delivers the ball with after all rarely changes with regards to the amount of effort he puts in at the point of release.

"I think his pace is natural, He doesn't have to think too much about it. It is his seam position that dictates that. When he bowls with the high over-spin, it comes out a lot slower. It comes with a squarer seam then it is slighting faster, and if it is completely flat seam, then it is really going to come out flat and much quicker," says Howard.

The biggest compliment that could come a spinner's way in days gone by was about how brave he was with his approach. It generally had to do with him having the gall to toss up deliveries to big-hitting batsmen and luring them into making a mistake. The risk-factor in how Lyon goes about his bowling is rather high too in Howard's opinion. It's got more to do with control, and the difficulty in mastering it.

"It takes a lot of hours, work and muscle memory to do it. He is resilient. He can get bashed over his head. I think he is brave, the ability to bowl the ball with high over-spin is high risk because it is not easy to do. It is a lot easier to fire the ball in with a square seam, and it is easier to be accurate. To be able to bowl with high over-spin and high revolution, there is a lot of risk involved," he explains. The returns though are high too, and perhaps worth the risk, especially if you can deliver as consistently as Lyon has managed to.

While it might be early to start talking about the legacy that Lyon will eventually leave behind, he's already changed the way Australia now views its young spinners. Ask Howard. As a spin development coach in-charge of shaping the spinners of the future in this country, he and his colleagues are now looking for very precise athletic attributes in them. And the Lyon effect can be seen across the board, he says.

"We are starting to discover that the spinners that are coming through are more athletic, where in the past spin tended to get the short, skinny and fat ones while now we are now getting the athletes. It's also a benefit of T20 cricket," he says.

Howard also uses the fitness aspect of spin bowling to kind of draw comparisons between Lyon and India's R Ashwin. He brings up Ashwin's tour of England from earlier this year and how he started off so strongly by getting the better of Alastair Cook on a couple of occasions. India's premier spinner in the modern era then suffered an injury in the third Test that affected his bowling severely in the fourth, where Moeen Ali outbowled him on a big-turning Southampton pitch. Looking on from thousands of miles away, Howard feels it was a question of Ashwin's body not being able to cope up with the demands of bowling over-spin consistently.

"His body sort of broke down at the end of that series due to the fact that he was putting so much vigour, he was running and jumping, and using so much of his body which allowed him to be a lot more effective. There were a couple of balls that he got Cook out with earlier in that series which showed the importance of bowling with overspin. Unfortunately, with time, his body couldn't stack up to it because he was conditioned. That is me coming from afar," says Howard. He draws parallels with how effective Lyon was in contrast when the pitch in Bangalore-where he recorded his best figures yet of 8/50-demanded overspin and the Aussie was up for it.

The chat between Howard and Lyon at the Adelaide Oval wasn't too long. It was more the coach standing around and watching as his former pupil showed him his wares and a glimpse into how far he's come in the time they've been apart.

"He's always remained humble and never forgotten his roots. He'd been working with John Davison a lot (former Queensland and Canada all-rounder and former spin coach of Australia) but I was down by the nets with the U-19 teams with the Pathway spinners, and Lyono called me into the nets and asked me to look at the way the ball was coming out," he says.

"Unreal," is what Howard then reveals having told Lyon. Not many batsmen around the world would disagree.

© Cricbuzz

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