Image courtesy of: The Guardian

Khawaja blames the Sheffield Shield pitches for Australia’s batting woes

While most cricket pundits and former players will put Australia’s failures with the bat in the ongoing Ashes series down to the fact that they are impatient, lack concentration and England’s bowlers hitting the right lines and lengths, Australian batsman Usman Khawaja has a different outlook on the matter, stating that the decline in the pitches used during Australia’s Sheffield Shield season is solely to blame.

Khawaja managed to score 54 runs during the second innings of Australia’s 347-run thrashing at Lord’s, but the continuous failures of the top and middle order batsmen is starting to baffle everyone.

In recent times, many of the pitches used during the Sheffield Shield tend to favour the bowlers more than the batsmen, but Khawaja noted that this was by no means the case in England as a majority of the pitches have something in it for both the batsmen and bowlers, thus making it a even contest between bat and ball, which is the essence of Test cricket.

“I think it’s always nice to get a nice variety of wickets,” Khawaja said. “I know when I started a few years back the SCG was a big turner, it broke up massively, it’s not really the same anymore there. Adelaide used to be the same, then in WA [Western Australia] and Brisbane you’d get wickets that were fast.

“Tassie [Tasmania] used to be a road but it’s not anymore, so things have changed a little bit in the last five years. The wickets have lost a bit of their characteristics over the last five years and it’d be really nice to see them come back.”

The second Ashes Test at Lord’s was the first time Khawaja has been called up for international duty since representing Australia against New Zealand in Hobart in 2011.

However, since 2011, Khawaja has only managed to score two centuries.

“I played five games last year of Shield cricket for Queensland,” he said. “I scored a hundred and a couple of 80s. Probably missed a few hundreds.

“So I probably wasn’t hard enough on myself personally, but ever since I got dropped from Australia a couple of years ago it’s been up and down, trying to find my way back.

“I feel like I’m in a good place now. Hopefully I can make some of those starts into big scores. That’s what I was trying to do, but you can’t control that. As long as you have the intention in your head that you want to score big, that’s all you can really do.

“We had some bad shots [at Lord’s], myself included, a few other guys played some bad shots to get out, and you can’t do that even in first-class cricket. One guy might be able to get away with it but you can’t have three or four players playing bad shots and getting out, you let your whole team down. If you spend time in the middle things get easier, and that was probably the key for us in that first innings. It was a pretty good deck out there in the first innings.”

Khawaja revealed that he never really minded switching between the longer and limited overs formats as it had become a common skill for all Australian players at the domestic level.

He also added that the rest of the team should be setting themselves simple, realistic goals throughout the next three Test matches, starting with the third Test at Old Trafford, Manchester, which gets underway on August 1.

“It’s all in your head, how you want to play, how you want to go about it,” he said. “If you want to play shots you play shots, if you don’t you don’t, if you want to play straight you play straight. Obviously you practice a few different things but in the end it’s still watching the ball and hitting it. I think the schedule was all right last year and I think it’s getting better this year. I’ve got no complaints about it.

“Obviously our batting hasn’t been as consistent as our bowling. We seem to take the wickets but we seem to let ourselves down with the bat. We understand how important first innings runs are, especially if you’re batting second in a game. That’s where you win cricket games. We’re not making any excuses. We’re not saying it’s good enough either. All we can do is go out there and apply our skills the best we can and try and take a bit of the onus on ourselves as batsmen in the top six to put our hands up.

“There hasn’t been a hundred scored on tour and that’s got to be our first goal going forward. Then go from there. And then, you know, what happens in the games beforehand we can’t control. We can only control the next three Test matches.”