As Australia – not for the first time – made hard work of sealing a Test match they had always looked like winning, Victoria’s Sheffield Shield team celebrated their first win of the season against a hapless New South Wales.
This was significant as much for the speed of that game’s conclusion as it was for the outcome in favour of Peter Handscomb’s team.
Nathan Lyon’s 6-128 arrived at the start of a critical nine months for him and the team.Credit:Getty Images
That’s because the young Victorian off-spinner Todd Murphy had another major impact on the course of a match, this time plucking 4-42 for figures of 7-86. It was a reminder that he is not only highly skilful but increasingly adept at the mental challenge of dominating the final innings of a game.
While no one can yet question the pre-eminence of Nathan Lyon as Australia No. 1 spin bowler, especially after he finished with 6-128, there was an undoubted sense of recurring inconvenience how the hosts made hard work of a fourth innings mop-up operation.
The task had undoubtedly been made harder, as it was during the Adelaide Ashes Test a year ago, by the absence of captain Pat Cummins from the bowling crease, this time as he nursed a sore quad, something very evident whenever he tried to chase a ball from mid-on.
In assessing an Australian Test side with four bowlers to have claimed over 200 wickets, and four senior batters with averages over 45, there is a question mark over how those prolific individual returns have not always added up to Test match and series victories.
The pattern, such as it is, relates to closing out matches in which four or five days’ hard graft and strong points advantage ultimately come to nothing. Looking back over the past decade, essentially from the time that the more senior of these players began their international careers, and there are lots of examples.
Nathan Lyon and Pat Cummins celebrate.Credit:Getty Images
In Adelaide in 2012, Faf du Plessis got South Africa out of jail, before the Proteas nearly wriggled similarly free in Cape Town two years later. Ben Stokes performed his miracle at Leeds in 2019, followed by another close call in Manchester.
India’s January 2021 draw in Sydney and win in Brisbane also caused eight days of solid cricket to go unrewarded, before Pakistan survived 171.4 overs in Karachi.
That last performance meant the subsequent victory in Lahore felt extremely rewarding, but all these near misses have added up to leave the Australian team with a sense of the unfulfilled despite those aforementioned individual records.
In particular, a pair of victories over India at home in 2021 would have vaulted the Australians into the inaugural world Test Championship final subsequently won by New Zealand in Southampton.
Beautifully as Lyon bowled at times in Perth, maintaining an excellent record at the cavernous stadium that hosted its first Test in December 2018, he has never been a consistent fourth-innings match-winner, averaging a tick under 30 in the conditions that should be aiding him most.
The measure of Australia’s success over the next nine months may well be intertwined with how often Lyon can impose himself on the closing stanza of a Test match.
By contrast, Cummins has often proved himself the most incisive of Australians when a match is there to be won: in the fourth innings of 11 winning matches he has been a part of, Cummins has scooped 24 wickets at 15.54, striking every 40 balls or so.
Cummins’ record compares favourably with the staggering returns of Glenn McGrath in such scenarios – 84 wickets at 14.16 and a strike rate of 38.5 from the 31 occasions he was part of a team where Australia won a match in the fourth innings.
This is all to say that in order to get the better of South Africa at home, then India and England away in what may well come to be remembered as defining Test matches for the team of Cummins, Steve Smith, David Warner, Usman Khawaja, Josh Hazlewood, Mitchell Starc and Lyon, a little more fourth innings guile may be required.
And Murphy’s emergence as a young off-spinner who genuinely wants to take control of such situations may be the final push that Lyon needs to get there.
