The first Ashes test in Cardiff was a serious wake up call for the Australians. The Aussies presently are confronted with a serious dilemma of axing senior all rounder Shane Watson. Watson first came in the line of fire after a string of failures in the 2015 World Cup. However, those failures were temporarily ceased as he batted in the middle order. The Australian team management did not focus too much on Watson as the side emerged victorious in the 2015 World Cup.
However, despite changing his batting position in tests, it has made absolutely no difference to Watson’s form. In the Cardiff test, Watson was found to be in deep waters. Despite batting in the middle order, Watson kept on struggling against the pacers and his wicket in the first innings boosted England’s chances of gaining a tremendous first innings lead.
Now with the highly talented Mitchell Marsh already in the ranks, waiting for an opportunity, it may well be the end of Watson’s Ashes. If Marsh delivers constantly throughout the Ashes, then we might have even witnessed Shane Watson for one final time in tests.
Darren Lehmann, the Australian coach too admitted his worry regarding the poor form displayed by Watson.
“At the end of day you don’t want to be getting out lbw all the time and you want to make more runs,” Lehmann said Sunday. “Shane would be disappointed, so are we. It’s one of those things where you have to find a way and that’s something we probably didn’t do as a batting group, not just Shane. We’ll certainly look at the wicket and work out the best XI to win in those conditions and it means making changes, we’ll make changes. That won’t be an issue for the selection panel. It’s going to be a tight call heading into the second Test.” “We can’t control what just happened, what we can do is learn from it and make the right decisions going forward,” said Lehmann
Ricky Ponting, under whom Watson flourished as a player too wasn’t highly optimistic about the all rounder’s future. “There’s a very big decision that needs to be made there…Watson hasn’t bowled a lot in this Test,” said Ponting. The couple of lines from Ponting were enough to hint about Watson’s diminishing returns.