It was a stern address from Australia’s bowling coach Craig McDermott during the lunch break that set Australia on the path to humbling England’s batting on the second day of the first Ashes Test in Brisbane.
Billy blast fires Aussie quicks
Australia vice-captain Brad Haddin, who top scored for his team in his 50th Test with a fluent 94, said that McDermott issued a blunt message to his quicks to pitch the ball up after lunch and the results were as remarkable as they were immediate.
While Mitchell Johnson (4-61) and Ryan Harris (3-28) led the rejuvenated attack, Haddin claimed it was Nathan Lyon’s double strike in consecutive balls to remove Ian Bell and Matt Prior that proved crucial in Australia’s day two success.
“We had earned the right to be in that position, we had built up good pressure leading up to Nathan Lyon’s two big breakthroughs,” Haddin said.
“We stayed with the plans that worked, though we probably didn’t start with the ball the way we would have liked, so at lunch ‘Billy’ (McDermott) let the bowlers know in no uncertain terms what was going wrong.
“We didn’t put the ball quite where we would have liked at the start of the (England) innings, and I think we probably tried a bit too hard.
“It’s good to have (Johnson) back in the team, and certainly to have one of those guys who can push the radar up around 150kph to rattle the other team. But it was Nathan Lyon who got things started today.”
Despite missing his century, Haddin found reason to celebrate soon after when he snared a leg-side edge from Jonathan Trott to notch his 200th dismissal in his 50th Test, the second-fastest in Test history (after Adam Gilchrist, who reached the milestone in his 46th Test) to attain the mark.
Asked what the milestone meant to him, he replied: “That I’m getting old.”
“When you start to reach milestones like that it means you’ve got more games behind you than ahead of you.”