Lyon’s bite as good as his bark
Often as not you can pick a cricketer from their build and bearing. Mitchell Starc, gangly, wiry, spry, could only be a fast bowler, just as David Warner, bullish, stocky and thickset, looks a natural batsman, and Tim Paine, slight and impish, has the cut of a wicketkeeper. But then there’s Nathan Lyon, who has the kind of everyday physique that gives hope to those of us who don’t get paid to play sport, and the unassuming appearance of someone you might bump into down the pub. Your mate’s mate. If you were trying to guess exactly what business Lyon has at a cricket ground, you’d likely run through a lot of options before you stopped on the job he’s actually got. Barman? Steward? Groundstaff?
Which, of course, is exactly what Lyon was doing for a day job back when Darren Berry first spotted him bowling off-breaks on a park pitch in downtown Adelaide. “Someone said, ‘That bloke on the roller is a pretty good off-spinner’,” Berry told Dan Brettig, in his good profile of Lyon over on Cricinfo . Lyon had already had a try-out for South Australia and been turned down, but Berry persuaded him to have a bowl, and liked what he saw. He got Jamie Cox to fast track Lyon through the State set-up into the Redbacks’ Big Bash squad. Seems Lyon’s one of those hapless chaps who’s often being underestimated, one way or another.
Even now. Lyon’s played 70 Tests and taken the larger part of 300 Test wickets for Australia, but in all the excitement about the three furies in their fast-bowling attack, no one gave a lot of thought to Lyon. The English press and public overlooked him, and perhaps their players and management did, too. Pretty much everyone under-estimated just how much influence he could have on the course of this series. But then no one, least of all the England, expects to be beaten by a finger-spinner on a tour Australia, any more than you worry about being run over by a bicycle when you’re crossing a main road.
Lyon snapped back into focus in that first Test, and not just because he made an exhibition of himself before the match by mouthing off about how he hoped Australia would “end the careers” of some English players this winter. It wasn’t that Lyon took five wickets, either, since they cost almost 150 runs. Instead, it was all about how Lyon dovetailed with the rest of Australia’s attack, and how he stacked up in comparison to England’s spinner, Moeen Ali. The match was a sudden reminder that Australia don’t only have sharper quicks than England do, they’ve a much more effective spinner too, especially in these conditions.
Finger-spinners don’t prosper in Australia, least of all when they’re foreign. The last time one of the opposition’s took a 10-for in a Test there was back in 1977, when Bishan Bedi’s slow left-arm took five in each innings at the Waca. (Bedi, note, was keeping a beady eye on this Test, and tweeted, with typically cryptic erudition, that Lyon “is enhancing self esteem manifold as arguably best tweaker on hard true surface”). And the last visiting off-spinner to take a 10-wicket haul in a Test was South Africa’s Hugh Tayfield in 1952.
Since then, a lot of good bowlers have turned in a lot of bad figures. Graeme Swann has 22 wickets at 53 in Australia, Ravi Ashwin has 21 wickets at 55, Harbhajan Singh nine at 73, Muttiah Muralitharan 12 at 75, Saeed Ajmal two at 111. Lyon, though, has a fine record, 123 wickets at 34 each, with an economy of 3.14 and a strike rate of 65. This is because he deals in flight and bounce and over-spin as much as he does side-spin, which is the tool most other off-spinners work with. As Lyon told Brettig, he learned to do this when he was a kid: “I was a pretty tiny fella growing up. I’m able to put more revs on it now, but I had to have the courage to flight the ball up as I wasn’t going to necessarily spin the batsman out, so I had to try to do guys in the air.”
It’s taken Lyon a lifetime to figure out the mystery of how to bowl off-spin in a Test match in Australia – Moeen is one week in to a crash course in the topic, and the injury he suffered in the warm-ups robbed him of a couple of extra lessons. Never mind the conditions, the Kookaburra ball itself was so foreign to him that the seam ripped his spinning finger after 15 overs, though, typically, he refused to blame the injury for his poor bowling in Australia’s second innings. “I just didn’t bowl very well”.
Whereas Lyon bowled just fine. He has a crystal clear understanding of his role and how to go about it whereas even after all this time, it feels like Moeen is still trying to figure out exactly what it is he’s supposed to be doing for the team. Which is why England went through that strange business of picking Liam Dawson and insisting he was their first spinner earlier this year. Lyon knows he’s there to menace England’s left-handers, which he did brilliantly well, and to hold down one end while Australia’s fast bowlers rotate at the other.
Which makes Lyon the belt and braces of the Australian attack. Without him, they wouldn’t be able to get away with playing four bowlers because the workload on the other three would be too heavy. In Brisbane, Lyon bowled 60 overs out of 189. And they only cost of 2.4 runs each, because England weren’t able to put him under enough pressure. Which is surely something they’ll try to change. Flick back through Wisden, and you find that the worst series Lyon has had in Australia was against South Africa in 2016, when he took six wickets at 58, and an economy of 3.56. Which also happens, of course, to be the only home series Australia have lost in the last four years.
• This is an extract taken from The Spin, the Guardian’s weekly cricket email. To subscribe to the Spin, just visit this page and follow the instructions.
