How Lyon made Moeen his bunny

Nathan Lyon has revealed how a brief stint in English county cricket last year was the spark for his record-breaking dominance over England allrounder Moeen Ali in the Ashes.

Lyon dismissed his fellow off-spinner seven times during Australia's 4-0 series win, the fifth bowler to have such a hold over a batsman in a single Test series and the first to achieve the feat in just nine innings.

The Australian, who said Dawid Malan and the recently-dropped James Vince played him the best of all the English batsmen he bowled to during the Ashes, will face Moeen again in the upcoming five-match ODI series in the UK.

He says the 'unconventional' fields he set for Moeen at times during the series had their roots in his short playing stint with the allrounder's county side Worcestershire during the northern summer.

While Moeen was on England duty at the time, Lyon gained some crucial intel from the Englishman's teammates that he took home with him to Australia.

"I remember one comment from (Worcestershire players) Ben Cox and Brett D'Oliveira," Lyon recalled recently to cricket.com.au. "They said 'Moeen Ali will try and hit a spinner out of the game and try and hit a boundary in his first over'.

"If you look back to the fields I had against Moeen Ali (during the Ashes), it was probably not the conventional left-hander's field. I had a deep mid-off, a deep cow corner and a deep square leg.

"I tried to take his boundary options out of it and see if he wanted to play the quiet game and try and nurdle me around.

"He's an explosive player and I rate him quite highly. It was more of a mental game, to take the big shots out of it and get him defending a lot more balls where he's more likely to make a mistake."

True to the words of Cox and D'Oliveira, Moeen wasted little time in taking on Lyon when the pair came together at the Gabba late on the opening day of the series; he slapped the fourth ball he faced from the spinner over the rope at a vacant mid-wicket area, leading to an immediate field change.

"That's when I said to Steve (Smith) 'let's put a deep mid-wicket out, that'll stop him playing the big shot and we'll see if he wants to do something else'," Lyon remembers.

"And then the success started from there."

With men pushed back on the rope, Moeen managed just three more runs from the next 20 balls he faced that evening before the pair resumed their battle the following morning. The left-hander picked up an early boundary with a firmly struck sweep shot that pierced the gap between deep mid-wicket and deep backward square leg, but Lyon eventually trapped his man in front for 38.

And the trend continued through the second innings in Brisbane and the two Tests that followed, with Lyon removing Moeen five times from six innings in total.

By the time the Englishman walked to the middle on the third day of the Boxing Day Test, he'd managed just 116 runs for the series and decided to throw caution to the wind to unsettle the off-spinner.

A wild slog from his first ball just avoided the hands of Pat Cummins and went over the rope at long off before, from the next delivery, a lofted drive past short cover earned the left-hander another boundary.

"I didn't feel like he was trying to change his game plan, until Melbourne where he really tried to take me on," Lyon says.

"And I thought 'right, this is another challenge of a left-hander coming extremely hard at me on a pretty docile wicket'. It wasn't spinning and it wasn't bouncing so really it should be pretty easy for a batter to take down a guy bowling 85 kms an hour."

But, as was the case all series, Lyon ultimately won the battle as Moeen firmly drove a catch to cover a short time later.

Despite his dominance over Moeen, Lyon said he never felt it was a guarantee that he would pick up the Englishman's wicket.

"You know you're in a challenge because you know they want to prove everyone wrong," he said.

"It's not me walking around with my chest out thinking 'how good is this, I'll bowl two balls to him and get him out, don't worry'.

"Everyone has their day. If I do have success of getting someone out a couple of times in a series, it's about going back to the basics and re-living what worked to get them out in the previous games."

The first of five ODIs between a new-look Australian side and the top-ranked England is at The Oval on Wednesday.