When the going gets tough the tough go camping, or at least that's the strategy at Cricket Australia (CA).
With the Boxing Day Test against India looming, national coach Mickey Arthur has summoned most of his top order to Melbourne for a special batting camp.
The idea is to arrest the slide that's made 2011 a year to forget for Australian Test cricket.
In eight Test matches, Australian batsmen have made just eight centuries. The country's lowest yield in over a decade.
Batting averages that are usually in the 50s have sunk to the 20s and the only records being set, like in South Africa last month, are the ones most would rather forget.
Australia's highest batsman on the recent Test rankings is Michael Hussey at 16 and captain Michael Clarke two spots further back.
Unbelievably, dumped opener Simon Katich is still Australia's third best batsman, ranked 28th in the world.
In response, Arthur has called on the likes of Ricky Ponting, Brad Haddin, Shane Watson, Clarke and Hussey to take part in special preparation ahead of India summer tour.
"I think it's just to put the microscope on everything, it's the fine tuning," team high performance manager Pat Howard said yesterday when announcing the camp.
"Mickey Arthur's driven this. He's done a great job and he's come and said 'look, we need to put some time in, we need to put some extra time and focus in'."
The knee-jerk reaction caught opener Watson so off guard he was not even aware of the camp when asked about it at a media conference later on Wednesday.
It is an unusual tactic forced on the batting order by a punishing schedule of Twenty20 cricket and the launch of the new Big Bash League.
In fact, there is no Sheffield Shield games until February, something ABC Grandstand commentator Jim Maxwell says is negligent on the part of CA.
"There should be a full round of Sheffield Shield matches between now and the Test match," he said.
"Cricket Australia have known for ages what was likely to be on the horizon going into a Test series to prepare their players.
"They've been negligent in not preparing themselves for that, because their focus has been entirely on the Big Bash which, you know, threatens to cannibalise the first series."
Maxwell says poor preparation and the subsequent hurry to get more form under the belts of the Test side's out-of-sorts batting order is down to CA's poor strategy.
"I think they're all over the place at the moment. They've spent so much money on getting this Big Bash up and running," he said.
"But they're diluting the product because everyone would like to believe the Border-Gavaskar series is the main event of the summer, but is it?"
Veteran Indian batsman Rahul Dravid also defended Test cricket in his Sir Don Bradman Oration on Wednesday night.
"We must scale down this mad merry-go-round that teams and players find themselves in; heading off for two-Test tours and seven-match ODI series and a few Twenty20s thrown in," he said.
"Test cricket deserves to be protected."
Victory in the Boxing Day Test looks about the only thing capable of justifying CA's scheduling and batting camp and avoid it being declared another swing and a miss.
Tags: cricket, sport, twenty20, australia First posted December 15, 2011 12:27:16
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