There’s a story from the Australian dressing room during a recent away Test series. Following another defeat to the home side, a senior figure, exasperated at another meek surrender, barked to the defeated Australians, “You’ve got to want it more! You’ve got to want it more! You’ve got to be tougher! You’ve got to be harder!” Upon receiving his plea, a senior Australian player responded ‘”Well that’s all great, but how do I stop nicking the ball to second slip?”



The Australian reflex to resort to aggression in the face of deficiency will not surprise many who’ve played the game here, at any level. It is enshrined in Australian cricket culture and is for many a point of pride, but as the national team looks to solve its considerable batting frailties its limitations have never felt greater.

Despite the tired calls for “grit” and “toughness”, the Australians keep collapsing. That word itself is too kind. To “collapse” connotes some unexpected drama; you can’t experience one without sturdiness before. With the Australians there is no sturdiness – their surrender has become predictable and patterned. On suburban fields here you often hear the cry of “six-out-all out!” With the Australians, that number feels more like three. It has arrived at the point where opposition teams are entitled to think, “If we get Warner and Smith, the innings is ours.”

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So now, a country with a proud heritage of churning out a cavalcade of run-makers is tamer than at any stage in its history. This, amid a glut of ICC riches and unprecedented resources. We shouldn’t be this bad at batting. What has happened to it?

A glimpse at a presentation delivered by national coach Darren Lehmann in 2014 to invite-only coaches is instructive. Entitled “The Australian Way” and shared in the aftermath of the Mickey Arthur era, it outlined how Australia needed to play its cricket. It encouraged attendees to implement Lehmann’s philosophy throughout the country. Understandably, it skewed to aggression.

A slide headlined “Batting – Key Points” saw Lehmann note the importance of being “aggressive in everything you do!”, that “[our] first thought is to score”, and that “team philosophy is going to be aggression and freedom going forward”. The first point of his opening slide simply said “WTBC” (translation: “Watch the ball, cunt”), going to show that even the most elementary aspect of Australian batting now requires aggression.

Lehmann’s zealous commitment to attack can often inspire, but might also be labelled stubborn one-dimensionality. In truth, it would be the perfect approach for cricket on hard, flat wickets. How Australia’s coach must wish for one on Thursday.

Now, Australia’s worship at the alter of ultra-attack permeates its entire system. Former Test opener and current NSW batsman Ed Cowan understands this more than most. “One of [our] biggest issues is the attitude of ‘attack at all costs’, which I think is defunct in Test cricket,” Cowan told Guardian Australia. “The message feeds through that we’ve got to pick attacking cricketers and that you need to be an attacking cricketer to be picked.”

Facebook Twitter Pinterest The technical failings of Australia’s batsmen were laid bare in a disastrous Hobart Test loss to South Africa. Photograph: Robert Cianflone/Getty Images

Under Lehmann, Australia’s batting unit has been as ruthless, impregnable and attractive as any in the world – when the conditions suit. The problems begin when conditions are friendlier to bowlers. Here, Australia’s batsmen look ill-equipped to manage a swinging, seaming or spinning ball with any consistency. We tacitly accepted it overseas, but to succumb in the present manner at home is unexpected.

“Australian cricketers are coached from a textbook that was written when Jesus was young,” says Trent Woodhill. His is not a name you’ll find in said textbooks as a player, but the 45-year-old New South Welshman has distinct coaching pedigree. A one-time assistant coach of New Zealand and New South Wales, Woodhill has been a coaching fixture in India’s IPL, first with the Delhi Daredevils and now Royal Challengers Bangalore.

He is also the assistant coach of the Melbourne Stars. A better sense of his coaching CV might be found in his iPhone contacts, where he counts a number of leading international batsmen as private clients, sometimes against an administrative body’s permission. In his home country though, Woodhill has to fight for credibility. This is because, in his words, “I’ve not played 50 Tests”.

In 2016, Australia boasts a coaching cabal that prioritises ex-players over qualified coaches, many of whom simply repeat the tired orthodoxy of their playing era. “At the moment everybody wants to be a batting coach,” Woodhill says. “And they want to talk about what they did: how many Shield games they played, how much Test cricket they played.

“[But] coaching is its own art. It has to be respected and it has to be learnt, because just like players are born to score 12,000 Test runs, coaches are born to be elite coaches.”

Woodhill is intent on emphasising that Australia has some excellent ex-players who can, or have, transitioned to become great coaches. But on the whole, the cricket community’s natural conservatism has led it to seek answers from the rear view mirror.

“The facts are we’re getting worse as a batting group, and there’s obviously a problem,” Woodhill says. “The solutions to the problem are found in the future. But everything Australian cricket does is trying to find an answer from the past.”

By “past”, Woodhill is referring to Australia’s indomitable teams of the 90s and turn of the century. These were outfits memorable for taking scoring rates to new heights, or, to borrow a common idiom today, for “pushing the game forward”.

But there is a key difference between that era and this one. Whereas Australia’s players then enjoyed relative autonomy to explore and develop their game independently, today’s players are cocooned in a bloated nest of coaches and support staff. They are implored to discuss their issues with ex-players who are more professional storytellers than educators, curtailing the opportunity for players to learn independently.

On this, Woodhill reserves particular praise for former Australian coach John Buchanan. “When Steve Waugh won the Ashes in England in 2001, John Buchanan was the coach,” he says. “He had power, but he gave it all up to the players.

“This meant players had to instinctively find things out for themselves and think for themselves. Now it’s the other way around. There’s so many high performance staff members, there’s so many sports science members, so many specialists. And the head coach – whether he agrees with it or not – has more power than the captain.

“So players don’t know where to go. Instead of going inwards to support themselves they feel like they have to discuss their game with somebody else.”

For those in Australia’s inner sanctum of coaching, the old textbook prevails. Lessons about the importance of using the top hand, keeping the bat on the ground when the bowler releases, and playing with a straight, perpendicular bat on contact are examples of the old orthodoxy, and they abound. Moulding the powerful, prototype “Australian” cricketer remains the aim.

Yet around the world, unorthodoxy is celebrated. It’s fair to wonder whether Hashim Amla’s feet, AB De Villiers’ backlift, Kevin Pietersen’s bottom hand or Virender Sehwag’s everything would have survived the Australian system, had they been born there. Dean Elgar’s patient hundred in Perth probably would not have happened were he Australian.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Trent Woodhill during a stint as Pakistan batting coach. Photograph: Joe Giddens/PA Archive/Press Association Ima

It all points to an aversion to difference, the latter being heavily policed both physically and socially in Australian cricket, and it’s holding the country’s batting back. Even Cowan, a product of the batting conveyor belt, acknowledges the limitations of tradition. “What’s happened is we’ve coached people out of unorthodox into orthodox, or ‘the right way of playing’. The technique right for each individual player is different.”

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Most concerning is that the collapsing epidemic is not confined to the Test team alone. A look at the last three rounds of Sheffield Shield cricket tells a similar story. In the last nine matches, there were 10 occasions where teams lost their last five wickets for less than 60 runs. That amounts to somewhere near one-third of batting innings resulting in collapse. Amid all the clamour over a near-brand new Australian batting unit, statistics like these point to a deeper, systemic issue, rather than a selectorial one.

So Australia will probably have to do better than “being hard”. As Woodhill says, “Society’s moved on from that 90s crowd. Toughness isn’t about calling the opposition a cunt. Toughness is about being able to repeat good things, even when you feel tired. Even when there’s trouble at home because the kids are missing their dad. Even when you’re under pressure because you haven’t scored runs.

“You can’t make people play better by saying ‘harden up, you cunt’. The bottom line is it doesn’t work.”

To Cowan’s mind, the best coaches have always been those who had school teaching backgrounds, because as he says, “to coach is to teach”. Australia has an enviable cast of former champions, but how well they’re teaching the next generation is open to debate. Whatever the solutions Australia find in their quest to bat well again, the answer is probably not “be harder”.