Ahead of the second Test in Adelaide, England team needs to find a way to dismiss Australian skipper Steve Smith to comeback in this series.
Notably, Smith was named the player of the match after his brilliant knock of 141 runs in the first innings which gave his team a valuable lead.
However, England bowlers were very defensive, as they kept on bowling outside the off-stump waiting for Smith to make a mistake. As a result, Smith took 261 balls teach his hundred, the slowest one in his career. Smith was patient enough to wait for deliveries bowled at him and got the upper hand in a battle between the world’s best batsmen and two of the world’s best wicket-takers.
Addressing the difficult question, the veteran fast bowler James Anderson suggested there is no need to bowl at him differently, just don’t look at him.
“I just think you’ve almost got to take him out of the picture when you’re bowling because if your eyeline is watching him and what he’s doing then I think it really distracts you from where you want the ball to go. You’ve got to really try and almost blank him out and really focus on where you want the ball to go. Obviously, the plans to him, I wouldn’t say they didn’t work, but we didn’t get him out, so they worked to an extent,” the veteran Anderson stated.
The 35-year-old Anderson further admitted Smith made the difference between the two teams and the 26 runs lead was huge for the visiting side.
When the tactics against Smith went wrong, the plan against Australia’s top-order was much more fertile, as David Warner, Usman Khawaja, and Peter Handscomb got out as planned.
Although the ploy against Smith didn’t work, Anderson is happy with the strategies employed against other batsmen.
“The encouraging thing for us is we came up with plans to all their batsmen before the series started and probably 70 percent of them worked. For us that’s encouraging, we can build on that. But there’s still that small matter of someone getting 140 which we need to deal with. We know the dangers of David Warner at the top as well, so we’ve got to keep working hard at getting those guys out because we know how pivotal they are in their line-up,” Anderson signed off.
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