England's Shoaib Bashir unfazed by Nathan Lyon's opinion ahead of Ashes series
The 37-year-old is well-known for stoking the pre-Ashes flames and suggested at a Cricket Australia function a fortnight ago that Jack Leach is still England's best spinner, adding Bashir 'has been OK'.
Bashir, currently recovering from surgery on the little finger of his left hand, was unmoved by the jibe, as he told the PA news agency: 'Everyone has their own opinions and that's fine.
Nathan Lyon, pictured, had a cheeky jibe at Shoaib Bashir recently (Ben Whitley/PA)
'I just stick to what I believe and what the people around me believe. I don't really look at that stuff.'
Bashir was far more complimentary towards Lyon as the 21-year-old added: 'I've never crossed paths with him but I have been watching him since I was young.
'I do enjoy the way he bowls, especially his overspin, it's a great asset he has, and the amount of revs he puts on the ball. He's someone I've been looking at for a while now.'
Taller than Lyon at 6ft 4in but with the same wiry frame, Bashir, whose 68 Test wickets have been at a modest average of 39, has been tipped to capitalise on excess bounce often found on Australian pitches.
A reconnaissance mission Down Under last winter yielded just four wickets in five matches for England Lions but Bashir, having worked under Graeme Swann out there, feels better prepared for the experience.
Bashir said: 'I learned you do get bounce but you've got to find a way to use that. I've got height but there's more than just height to extract bounce from the wicket. Just small technical things.
'It's just (about) nailing what I do best. If you look at my attributes – I'm tall and try to put as many revs on the ball as I can, with that comes variations.
'I'm still learning, still quite young, I'm still trying develop my game and better myself day-by-day. That will never stop. I love talking about the game and I love learning.'
Bashir is likely to get his first experience of Ashes cricket on November 21 in Perth, having featured in a hotly-contested series against India this summer where there were a number of flashpoints.
The battle for the urn could see more heated scenes and Bashir, usually a cool customer, insisted he would not be afraid to stand his ground as England look for a first win in Australia since 2010-11.
Shoaib Bashir attended a Chance to Shine event in Nottingham this week (Chance to Shine handout/PA)
He said: 'Don't be surprised if I do have a word but I genuinely like to keep things cool. If things do get heated then I'm there.
'It would be special and a great achievement (to win the series), especially with this regime at the moment. We're looking forward to what it brings.'
Bashir was speaking to promote a Chance to Shine event in Nottingham, where this week the children's charity ran national finals for the street clubs it runs. Chance to Shine run more than 300 street clubs in under-served areas of the UK, with free weekly sessions and no equipment or specialist clothing needed.
Bashir – who, unusually for an England cricketer, came through a state school – added: 'I was lucky enough to have a very supportive uncle who would put me into cricket camps and small things like that.
'We didn't play much cricket in our school growing up. Small things like what Chance to Shine are doing makes a massive difference. It gets kids out the house and not sat in front of their PlayStation or X-Box.'
: Shoaib Bashir was speaking at the Chance to Shine national Street cricket finals. Chance to Shine is a national charity that uses cricket to inspire young people and teach them key life skills.
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Times
an hour ago
- Times
Funky fields and ‘Bazball' batting — 2005 Ashes was trailblazing series
It was a series ahead of its time. 'It definitely felt like in that Test series we were playing a different form of Test cricket to anything that had been played previously, particularly in the aggressiveness of some of the batting,' Andrew Strauss, England's opener in the 2005 Ashes, says. He is right. It was not quite Bazball, which peaked for England at 5.50 runs an over in their Pakistan series in 2022, but England's run rate of 3.87 in that Ashes series is their 12th-fastest ever (the top nine are all in the Bazball era) — a series that they won, remember, against an attack of Glenn McGrath, Shane Warne and Brett Lee, with the fourth bowler (either Mike Kasprowicz or Jason Gillespie) mercilessly targeted, even though they were two very fine operators. 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But here was Andrew Flintoff neutering Gilchrist, one of Australia's greatest weapons, with that angle of attack. The left-hander, who changed the role of the wicketkeeper-batsman for ever, averaged only 22 in that series, without even as much as a half-century, dismissed four times by Flintoff, all from round the wicket. England's dressing room during the 2001 Ashes had a whiteboard detailing the Australia batsmen's weaknesses and, as a result, plans to dismiss them. Next to Gilchrist's name there was nothing but a question mark. It has been said that the 2005 plan came about by accident when Flintoff had to move to round the wicket because of a dodgy foothole in a one-day international at Lord's earlier that summer. Whatever the genesis, as Simon Jones later revealed in his autobiography, by the time of the first Test, the whiteboard read: 'Go around the wicket and cramp him for room.' It was no surprise that England had come up with a plan of some sort because the head coach, Duncan Fletcher, was a stickler for the importance of angles in both batting and bowling. In exasperation he once asked Marcus Trescothick: 'Did you do geometry in school?' when Strauss's opening partner was unable to fathom the gist of Fletcher's thinking, with the coach playfully slipping a couple of protractors under Trescothick's door while on tour in Sri Lanka. Before the 2005 series Fletcher had warned Strauss about the danger of the angles he was creating when playing Warne's leg spin. Strauss wanted to move across his stumps and play everything to the leg side with the spin, but Fletcher suggested, if the ball was short enough, that Strauss stay leg-side of it and punch it with a straight bat through cover. 'I'd just got a hundred against [Stuart] MacGill [another Australian leg spinner] six months before and I remember thinking, 'I think I'm OK here, mate,' ' Strauss says. 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But it's one thing doing it against the Merlyn machine and another doing it against Shane Warne in the middle of an Ashes Test match.' Playing against the spin, as long as the length is right — either short enough or full enough — has now become an accepted coaching tip at the top of the game, with Rahul Dravid's famous email to Pietersen when the England batsman was struggling so badly against left-arm spin containing just that advice. Mind you, those problems of Pietersen's were mainly brought about by the introduction of the Decision Review System, which was not in place in 2005, and caused players to think about playing finger spin very differently, representing a huge change in the game from that time. 'It didn't affect me quite as much as some others,' Strauss says. 'I was always trying to get my bat in front of my pad anyway. Back in the day people used to squeeze the ball between bat and pad, but you couldn't play like that any more.' The round-the-wicket to left-handers theory was much more of a problem for Strauss, as South Africa's Morne Morkel later exploited it remorselessly. Gilchrist's weakness would undoubtedly have been acted upon more quickly these days. England may now be reining in the size of their analysis team a little but there is still a whole heap of data out there for teams to use. Back then there was very little. 'Obviously we'd worked out that Gilchrist really struggled with that angle,' Strauss says. 'What we didn't have at that stage was the deep statistical analysis to back up our hunches. In the latter stages of my career it became obvious that was an angle that was hard to contend with. In those days we were very much using Fletch's eye, where technical weaknesses might occur. 'Increasingly these days you will find out a player's weakness very quickly in a way that probably took longer back in those days. I was a good example. You come into Test cricket, you have a good run and then after a year or so people start working you out. That time is definitely shortened now. To a certain degree everyone knows everyone anyway because of franchise cricket, but there's fewer places to hide these days.' As Mark Garaway, England's analyst from the following winter onwards, tells me, we now know that Gilchrist was a right-eyed-dominant left-handed batsman, and so the angle from Flintoff round the wicket and reverse-swinging the ball away meant the ball was constantly going into the line of his less preferred left eye. The solution would have been to close off even more in his stance. Nowadays bowling round the wicket to left-handers for right-arm bowlers is almost de rigueur, but as David Warner consistently showed in his horror times against Stuart Broad, it does not mean that batsmen can counter it successfully. 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That's what you were doing for the best part of three months in England — worrying about what the opponent is going to do.' ' The field placings by the captain, Michael Vaughan, contributed to this too. There are some funky fields these days, but Vaughan startled Australia with some of his arrangements, placing a short extra cover at Edgbaston for Matthew Hayden, who immediately hit one there to Strauss, and constantly playing on Hayden's ego that thrived on the boom of a straight drive by placing a catcher so straight that he was almost on the cut strip. Much was made of Pat Cummins's Bazball-spooked immediate use of sweepers at Edgbaston in the first Test of 2023, but it was the smart use of sweepers and in-out fields by Vaughan that also cornered Gilchrist back then. 'They were agile with their field settings,' he said. 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6 hours ago
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Aussie cricket legend lifts the lid on how Sir Ian Botham was SAVED after he fell into crocodile-infested waters during fishing trip: 'I should have got a knighthood'
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