Australian Pitches and Future of Spin | Australian Cricket Coach Andrew McDonald (31.03.26)

So there's been commentary around the batting at shield level, the fact that only one player

beyond 700 runs, that's Pete Hanscomb, and only a handful of players averaged better than 40.

Is that modern batting? Is that modern pitches? What do you read into the batting numbers from

this shield season? I always believe that it's not one thing in particular. It's a combination.

So yeah, there may be an element of stretching players across all three formats and how demanding

that is, and we've had our sort of conversations around Cameron Green and the expectation across

three formats, and it is difficult to potentially shift and be everything to every format.

There's a conversation around the wickets, the seeming conditions that have favoured the ball,

but you look at that, and then you see a quality player like Alex Carey going to get 100,

so there's an element that it is possible, but you look at the amount of starts across this game,

and then you get 52, 26, 37, 18, there's a lot of 20s and 30s and 40s. It does appear that it's

difficult to maximise along innings on the surfaces that we are playing, and there's an element

that teams gear up to their strengths as well, and I think around the country there are some

strong bowling attacks, and in particular that are quality seam attacks that given conditions

in their favour are going to make it difficult for opposition batters. So yeah, it's a real state

of the game conversation. I don't know that you can pinpoint one area in particular. Is it like

defensive skills from the batters because of T20, but then you look at the scoring rates, so there's

a positive to that as well. Yeah, so I think in this offseason there will be a lot of discussion

around at the MCG, pitching in particular, created that discussion, and what we've seen at the back

end of the shield season, with the numbers that the batters are putting out. But I still believe

that the top players in those conversations, you look at the Hanskins and Bancrod, they're the best

players compared it to the rest as well. So maybe it's just the context around it is that the

bowls numbers are going to come down by roughly 10, and the batters are going to come down by 10,

so you're going to get bowls averaging in the teens, which is rare, and you're going to get

batters that potentially would average mid 40s, they're going to average mid 30s, so maybe that's

just the new thing that we've got to judge. Philosophically, do you think the pitches in Australia have

tilted too far in favour of bowling? I think you could create a nice debate around that,

and you can just do that through purely the numbers. But as I said, the byproduct of that,

we're drilling into it as an Australian cricket team as well. Steve Smith, we use him as the

benchmark as one of our greatest level players, if you've not arguably are at greatest level

batter, and he's sort of averaging around the mid 40s in Australia over the last four years,

so his career average, I think before that was about 58, so if you think that comes down to 45,

the other players potentially that are averaging 45, they might average 35. So you might just in

the context of everything, you might just find that they are still performing as just the conditions

that potentially are challenging out, and we've gone into measuring percentage of runs as well,

so as the scores shrink down, we're trying to give a little bit of a different perspective to

our group to get some context around those performances, and we use percentage of runs in the game,

and because the totals have come down, the percentages remain the same in terms of you call

batters, contributing that type of percentage of runs. To give me an insight into a player that might

be underestimated on average, that actually is high up there in percentage of runs.

I don't think you'd be shocked by any of it. I mean, Travis Heds had an incredible period of time,

and he's percentage of runs is in the high 20s. Steve Smith sort of in around that 20%

market, and the other batters are somewhere in sort of between sort of 11 and 15% in the top

sort of 6 to 7. Rungett is Alex Carrier now standing here this year, but if you actually then

draw that back to a previous generation where the scores were higher, the actual percentage of

runs that the top order of contributing are nearly the same. So I think that it's really just about,

you know, we don't get those 500 scores anymore, and 28300 is an entry point into the game.

So the game's just been placed slightly differently in the moment. Now, is that going to continue?

Will there be a shift? Will there be a re-correction? He sure would suggest that we have gone through

in shield cricket in particular some flat years when the bat has dominated the ball, and now we're

probably crept into the ball dominating the bat. So I mean, the biggest consideration for us is

are we stretching our players in our home conditions across the traits that the wickets usually had.

So we're seeing less spin-balling as we're trying to say, even if we got criticised around that

at the Gabba, we got criticised out around the SCG, but our belief is sometimes you can't play

in spot other conditions, and you've got to pick a team to perform, and I think that's what

the shield teams are doing. Would it be preferable if we had at least one ground,

if not a philosophical shift back towards spin-balling that we had maybe the SCG restore what it

previously has been? Yeah, I think this year was probably the SCG at its best. That was an excellent

test match, and I think as that test match wore on, and we saw some turns start to happen,

and we were almost questioning our selection because you always start to discuss things in

hindsight. We believe that wicket was going to crack and go up and down a little bit more than

what it possibly did or potentially did. Yeah, you would love to see those traits of the venues

connect back to the past, and we've seen Adelaide Owl has offered some seam early, flattened

out in the middle, and then spun late, and I think the test match was an excellent test match cricket

wicket. Some people thought it might have been too flat, and the SCG as well. So those two almost

got back to their traits from the past. The Perth pitch is telling you, Isaac's working through

what that surface looks like, but I thought that was a really good wicket this year as well.

All bet only went two days, and I don't think that was a reflection on the surface. I think

that was a reflection on two teams entering into a big series that was slightly nervous, and there

was a lot of error early on in that game, and the MCG, we don't need to talk too much more about

that, and then the Gabo pinball test match, I think it's only a third pinball test match,

so it's very difficult when you're throwing a problem at a ground, but I think that was an

excellent wicket as well. So yeah, we're doing a lot right at the test level. There is conditions

that favour ball at times, and we've just got used to that. Is there a risk in Australia that we

are marginalising spin bowling? There's always a risk when you look at a shield final with 26 overs,

bolder spin. I think I hope I've got my mass right there, so you would think that spin in a five

day game at the back end of a season, there might be a little bit more for there for the spinner.

There's not to be whether that pitch was tailor-made, or whatever, you don't know the conversations

that are happening in the background, but spin overs are definitely dropping. I think there was

an article yesterday on Career Australia's website in terms of the percentage of overs of spin.

It has dropped in the last sort of four years, so I think it's definitely a consideration.

We do also have the opportunity within our Australia set up to get the development into spinners.

We're off to an India A series, which isn't too far away, which will connect nicely

into India 27 for us. So I don't think the spinners that are around the country are lacking

development opportunities, because there are other avenues to get that in, and sometimes your home

ground might not offer spin, but there's other opportunities that lie there. We hope we're still

able to invest into that skill set, and it's incredibly important skills set. We don't like not

playing a spinner, and we've had to do it a few times, and there's been plenty of noise around that.