Pitfalls of Australia's natural batting game

For many years after World Series Cricket ushered in a wide proliferation of limited-overs matches in Australia, there remained a deep divide between the methods used for those games and Tests. A superior ODI performer like Simon O'Donnell could be viewed as a Test match liability, likewise a Test banker like Mark Taylor viewed with scepticism in a coloured clothing context - until captaincy made him a fixture.

Even if players were in both Australia sides, their methods could contrast wildly between formats. Dean Jones penned a book in 1991 called One-Day Magic, where he outlined the shots he played in one-day matches but not Tests, and pre-emptively mourned the death of spin bowling in the limited-overs arena. While scoring rates were overall lower during this period, there remained a gap between those commonly seen in Tests (often around 2.5 runs per over) and ODIs (4-4.5).

Intrinsic to this disconnect was the fact that batsmen played plenty of matches in both formats at both domestic and international levels - they had time in Sheffield Shield matches to hone their long-form methods, while the ODI schedule afforded plenty of opportunities to work out more expansive plans and techniques for one-dayers.

Thus it was possible for a batsman like Mark Waugh to play innings as contrasting as a match-saving century at Adelaide Oval against South Africa in January 1998, and a freewheeling hundred opposite Michael Di Venuto in an ODI at the same venue earlier in the same summer. The same was true of Steve Waugh, who crowned his first ODI hundred, against Sri Lanka at the MCG in 1996, with a towering straight six before steeling himself to soak up 273 minutes and 221 balls for 67 against India on a fiendishly difficult Delhi pitch a few months later.

Twenty years on, however, a rather different picture has emerged. A treadmill of a schedule, the rise of domestic T20 tournaments, and increasing emphasis on positive, assertive batting rather than sound defence have meant that there are now few discernible differences between the way Australia's batsmen play across Test and ODI formats. It appears as though certain arts of batsmanship are being lost at the altar of "playing my natural game".

The most salient example of all this has cropped up in the gap between Australia's ODI tour of South Africa immediately preceding the present Test series. Australia's planners deemed the tour unimportant - or inconvenient - enough that Mitchell Starc and Josh Hazlewood were both kept well away from it. Yet it was across those five matches that the Proteas gained a couple of critical advantages, both mental and tactical.

For Kagiso Rabada, fast emerging as the finest pace bowling prospect of his generation in the world, the series offered a priceless chance to get his impressively mature head around the concept of bowling to Australian batsmen, both the leadership duo of Steven Smith and David Warner but also antipodean willow wielders in general. As he said after the Perth Test:

"It definitely did help in terms of strategy. You tend to develop a sense of where to bowl to different batters and it helped in that regard. But you still have to come and execute. Aussies play pace well, they grow up playing on quick wickets and facing quick bowlers.

"So it was a learning curve for me in the ODI series in terms of different batters hitting the ball different places, so it was key for me now and for other bowlers to come and execute the plans, and we still have to do it leading into the next two matches."

Australian vulnerability against the moving ball, or even merely straight ones, was writ large across the WACA Test. South Africa's bowlers claimed no fewer than eight lbw verdicts against their opponents' zero, a trend arguably more alarming for Australia than the quirks of the fates befalling Smith (well down the pitch) in the first innings or Mitchell Marsh (pinned on the toe by a sharp inswinger) in the second. Similar differentials had been seen in Sri Lanka this year, and the UAE in 2014, and their emergence down under suggests a worsening problem.

Allied to the issues of covering up adequately in defence were those of picking the right tempo for the right moment. That was the sort of skill mastered by the former Test batsman Michael Hussey, who relied upon a highly tactical and adaptable method to see off various bowlers in differing situations. South Africa, of course, are a team well known for having the ability to stonewall when needed.

In the words of Dean Elgar: "I think it's a good thing for us to have an array of flexible players within our batting unit. A guy like Hashim didn't contribute much in the first Test and we know what he can achieve as well. So having a lot of guys put up their hands and make a big play for the team is very important for us. It's very important to us to have those different kinds of players in our team, it's a good dynamic and a good build for the batting unit."

Elgar's particular brand of batting is of a kind almost unheard of in Australia circa 2016. He is a grinder and a fighter, not overly fluent or expansive, and able to work doggedly in the company of others. His hundred was a source of some irritation to the Australians, grinding them down in a way the hosts cannot really replicate.

"It's just my nature to try to irritate the opposition - I don't think I'm practised in it, I think it comes naturally," he said. "But if that's the way they feel about it, it's not a bad thing. It's an objective that I achieved in the last Test, and it's going to be something that I'll try to work more going into the second Test and possibly the third Test as well."

Interestingly, the increasingly homogenised method of Australian batting, across all formats, mirrors no one so much as the coach Darren Lehmann himself. As a prolific batsman for South Australia, Yorkshire and sporadically Australia between 1996 and 2005, he demonstrated the advantages of an unshakeable belief in a positive method, going after bowlers and manipulating fields. Yet his pathway was a narrow one shared by few of his generation. Lehmann was, in one former team-mate's words, "a freak".

The current batting coach, Graeme Hick, was another who tried to bat in a similar way more or less each time he went out to bat, using his height and power to commanding effect. This resulted in a prolific and dominant county career but an underwhelming record in Tests. The pressing question for Lehmann, Hick, Smith and the rest of the nation's batsmen is this: how many of them are really good enough to take the same approach, come what may?