India challenged Nathan Lyon in his early days. He is now turning the table
When Michael Clarke and Mickey Arthur backed Nathan Lyon with a baggy green on the tour of Sri Lanka in 2021, it was purely on the promise the off-spinner had to offer, having played only four first-class games and taken only 12 wickets at a dismal strike rate of 86.5 balls per wicket. Lyon was quick and smart to pounce the opportunity to become the match-winner for the Australians they were desperately looking for in the subcontinent by a fifer in his maiden Test and repaid the faith immediately.
But, the bigger challenges were looming large for the Kangaroos as they had to head to South Africa, the country which has not produced a single world-beating spinner in their history. Also, Lyon was to play the majority of matches at the Australian pitches, which don’t have the reputation of being conducive to spin (Shane Warne was a genius and an outlier).
Although the series against Sri Lanka and South Africa did go as per the plans, there was a sense of unknown about Lyon as the Australians were gearing up to host the MS Dhoni-led Indian team, that had the long list of batsmen who were rated as master of players against spin bowling. Experts and Australians were rating the series against India as the big litmus test for Lyon, who for the first time was to bowl against the likes of Gautam Gambhir, Virender Sehwag, Rahul Dravid, Sachin Tendulkar and VVS Laxman.
They had valid reasons to rate the series as a litmus test for Lyon as their best produced in the spin bowling department—Shane Warne had a history of torrid days against the then middle-order batsmen of the Indian team.
Fast forward to 2020, now Nathan Lyon is on the verge of two special milestones—400 Test wickets and 100 Test matches and the achievements whenever they arrive imply only one inference—that Lyon passed the litmus test one after the other and kept on churning at the opposition batting line ups as the likes of Mitchell Johnson, and Patrick Cummins kept on earning the headlines.
Indian teams, both under the leadership of MS Dhoni and Virat Kohli have been an integral part of Lyon’s journey in Test cricket. Australia defeated India 4-0 in the 2011 Border Gavaskar series and when Michael Clarke led the Kangaroos back to India for the defence in the 2013-14 season, the team needed Lyon to come back to becoming the aggressive bowler, the quality with which he started his career in 2011.
But the tour turned out to be a setback for Lyon and the first part of it almost ended his Test career like other spinners who show promise but fizzle out with time against good batting teams.
In the first Test in Chennai, he was taught a tough lesson that his predecessors were taught very harshly by the likes of Navjot Singh Siddhu and Sachin Tendulkar. MS Dhoni took offence at the line of his bowling and started nailing him over the top. Turned out, Lyon could not match the courage and stroke-making of MS Dhoni and Australian were made to feel inferior in the very first Test. Subsequently, he was dropped from the second Test, but his replacement, Xavier Doherty, proved to be more ineffective than him and Clarke had no options but to reinstate him back into the playing XI.
After another debacle in Mohali in the third Test, Clarke persisted with him for the final Test in Delhi and the pitch was turning big time for him to make a name against the Indian batting line up that was not showing cracks against him. Once again Lyon saw a once in a lifetime opportunity and once again he seized it with splendid bowling performances. He picked seven precious wickets in the first innings to keep Australia in the game, and it turned out to be the stage for Lyon from where he never looked back again.
A couple of Ashes series followed after the series against India, and although those were dominated by seam and pace bowling, Lyon was always there, plugging the whatever gaps the pacers were leaving him to fill.
Another breakthrough series came in the next year and fortunately against India that sealed his fate in the Australian dressing team. The Indian team was without their captain and the maverick who had wreaked havoc for Lyon in Chennai, MS Dhoni who was out with wrist injury but the team under Virat Kohli was no pushovers.
The Indian team showed valiant determination for the fight and took the game to the hosts and threatened to chase a total on the final day of Adelaide Test, with Virat Kohli leading the counterattack with centuries in both innings. Indian batsmen were in no mood to let Lyon get away with good figures and they followed the pattern set by MS Dhoni. But, this time, the situation was different and Lyon was prepared and had a measure of the pitch at Adelaide Oval more than Indian batsmen and he bowled Australia to victory on the back of 12 wickets in the match, although conceding runs at an economy rate in excess of 3.5 and 4 implying the aggressive approach by the Indians against him.
Now, Lyon is a veteran of 97 Tests and with 391 wickets in his bag, he has matured as a bowler and reads the game and minds of batsmen with such ease. He recognises the challenge that the current Indian team, like the team of the past, will look to him for scoring opportunities but he is not running away from any contest either. In the last series, Mayank Agarwal showed signs of taking the game to him after surviving the initial burst of Cummins, Starc and Hazlewood, but after a brief period of domination by the young right-hander, Lon showed he was not going to be rattled by the onslaught and outplayed Agarwal in the battle of nerves.
"India will probably look to try to attack me again, especially when you look at the quality of the quick bowlers we've got here in the Australian side. So I think it's one of their tactics to come at me, which is totally fine, I'm pretty used to having guys come after me but it's just about, for me, being able to know when to attack and when to defend as well and realise who I'm bowling with at the other end and having that partnership. So it's all fun and part of playing cricket, especially being a little spin bowler, you're going to have a lot of guys come out and try to attack you,” Lyon said in a virtual press conference.
While he has been challenged more often by the aggressive Indian batsmen who come at him with intent to change his usual approach of bowling, he has been equally thwarted by Chesteshwar Pujara, who has shown a tendency of sitting in the crease, and waiting for the off-spinner to commit mistakes to pounce on. Simply, Pujara tries to outplay Lyon in the game he wins against other batsmen— the battle of patience. Pujara was done in by Lyon in Adelaide in the first innings when the Indian number three could not pick the length early and was caught in the middle of the front foot and back foot and Lyon has hinted that the Australian put a big prize on Pujara’s wicket and that he has some more tricks to foax the Indian mainstay.
"Pujara is a world-class batter and he's going to be a big challenge for us for the rest of the series. We spoke about him in-depth before the series started, it was good to see a couple of plans come off in Adelaide, but we've got a couple more things up our sleeve hopefully that if he does get in we can put in to deploy. He's a world-class batter so it's always fun challenging yourself against the best players in the world and Pujara's definitely one of those guys.
The home team is buoyant at bowling the Indian team for bowling them out for their lowest score in the history, but Lyon is also pragmatic enough to look at the event of the day three of the first Test as something that can’t be done every day.
"That was one of the days when nothing went right for them and everything went right for us. So we've all had them, it's part of the game of cricket," Lyon added.
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