Clarke reveals Australia’s biggest mistakes on Indian tour so far

Former skipper Michael Clarke believes Australia’s poor performance on their tour of India so far has been riddled with ‘big mistakes’. Clarke felt the biggest mistake Australia made was not playing a warm-up game before the four-Test series began on February 9. Pat Cummins instead opted to have a brief camp near Bengaluru before the first match of the series in Nagpur and practice in conditions similar to Indian conditions at home.

Two weeks later, the visitors trail 0-2 in the series and have already missed out on a chance to lift the Border-Gavaskar Trophy. Clarke said on the Big Sports Breakfast on Monday, “I am not surprised by what I am seeing because we did not take part in the practice match. Big, big, big mistake. There should have been at least one match to acclimatize to the conditions.” The first two Tests exposed the weaknesses of the Australian batsmen against top spin bowling.

In New Delhi, the visiting team’s batsmen tried to deal with the spinners by playing the sweep but this strategy failed miserably. Apart from this, according to Clarke, another big mistake was not feeding Travis Head in the first test. Left-handed batsman Head top-scored for Australia in the second innings of the second Test with 43 off 46 balls as the entire team was all out for 113. This was the first time that he opened the innings in a Test match.

Clarke said, “Selection for the first test, big, big mistake. He swept in the second Test, we saw a lot of sweep shots in the first Test. When you start your innings, those are not the right times to sweep.” Half of Australia’s batsmen were dismissed by sweeps or reverse sweeps on a low-bouncing pitch. “It doesn’t matter how many support staff you have around, you’re playing for Australia,” Clarke said. Obviously as a batsman playing at the highest level, you calculate risk versus reward.

Clarke also said that Australia should have learned from India how to bat in spin-friendly conditions. He said, “It seems that we are not seeing India batting. Suppose these people know the conditions so well and accordingly they are playing. Why would we try to do anything different when they’ve been so good?

This former captain said, “If we had scored 200 runs, we could have won the match. Our score was 60 runs for one wicket. Australia lost their last nine wickets by adding 52 runs. India got a target of 115 runs which they achieved by losing four wickets. Clarke also questioned Pat Cummins’s decorating of fielders on Sunday. He said, “I am not sure what happened to our strategy. We had only 100 runs. At one point, Cummins had four players on the boundary. There were two and a half days left in the Test match. You are either getting India out for less than a hundred or you are losing.