'Need plan against spin'

Every time the Australians step foot on the sub-continent, questions about their ability to tackle spin efficiently keep popping up. Even during the ongoing ODI series, at all three venues so far, the Aussies have been constantly queried about their failure to handle Yuzvendra Chahal and Kuldeep Yadav effectively.

In the two completed games, Chahal and Kuldeep have accounted for a combined 10 wickets — five scalps each — with the latter even bagging a hat-trick in Kolkata after running through the inexperienced middle-order. While Chahal has tossed the ball up nicely and forced the under-pressure batsmen to go for the big shots and getting them caught or stumped, Kuldeep, despite receiving some beating from Glenn Maxwell, has foxed them with his chinamans and wrong’uns.

Vice-captain David Warner felt a good game plan is needed to counter the threat posed by the tweakers. “I feel that players can read them. The odd one or two, you can’t see the seam and the spinners wrap up the wicket. It’s the odd one here or there. But at the end of the day, you need to have a game plan against the spinners. Whether to hit down the ground or sweep the ball. When you are losing wickets in clumps, you become tentative. So you have to apply that pressure. If you get off to a good start (and when) the spinners come on, it’s a different game then. It’s the tempo and situation of the game. I feel if we are in a different position, you are going to see a different mode against the spinners.”

Warner, who arrived for this series on the back of two consecutive Test centuries in Bangladesh, said there’s no excuse to the two batting collapses as some of them have played Tests in India and the IPL. “When it comes to technique, when you grow up on wickets that are fast and bouncy, and then you come to the Sub-continent and it’s your first Test series, it’s very hard to adapt. But when you keep coming back, there’s no excuse. You should know the conditions very well. In saying that, when you’re out there, you become tentative. The game situation dictates that if you lose a couple of wickets, what do you do? Do you use your feet? Do you play with one stride?

“These are the things that you have to work out and adapt when you’re here. So as a senior player coming back to these situations, you should know your game well enough. Our talk in the one-day format is to get off strike, to hit the guys in the boundaries. You should know that game very well.”