Australian cricket coach Andrew McDonald has defended West Australian all-rounder Cam Green after a lean home summer and says they are looking to lock him into a defined role within the Test team.
Green's Recent Struggles
Green battled through a tough Ashes series, averaging 24.42 with his lean run with the bat, then following him to the subcontinent as he averaged just eight during Australia’s disastrous T20 World Cup campaign. He also didn’t fire with the ball, leaving many fans questioning the 26-year-old’s position in the national setup.
The Need for a Defined Role
However, the West Australian wasn’t given a defined role within the team after having returned from back surgery, batting from No.4 down to No.8 at different times over 12 months. While McDonald said the yo-yo nature of Green’s Test existence was “no excuse” for underperforming, he admitted they need to give the all-rounder a more stable position to give him the best chance to flourish.
“We’re going to find a position for him; he’s been up and down,” McDonald added. “That’s no excuse, but that is something that we’re working on. He’s got high standards with the way he critiques his performance, and I think the external have also got those high standards. The thing lacking in how we are judging him is the sum of all parts, and what he does to the team in structuring it up, his fielding positions. He hasn’t got the runs that he would like, we’re not hiding behind the fact that he hasn’t performed at a level that we think he can. He’s working incredibly hard on that.”
Preparation for Future Series
McDonald also suggested they needed to consider how Green prepared ahead of big series, especially with Australia facing their most important 18 months of cricket this decade, including a tour of India, the 150th anniversary Test and an away Ashes.
“If you remember back, we had a white-ball series (in New Zealand), and we put him through the Shield game down in Tassie and got him ready through Shield, and we got a good response there. He got 170-odd, it was a brilliant innings,” McDonald recalled. “So maybe there is a consideration around how we’re preparing him going into a Test series. We’ve got a good chunk of time leading into the Top End series (against Bangladesh) as well, it’s very rare that we have that period of time. We’ll probably get some time and space to really invest in some parts of each individual’s games.”
Broader Batting Concerns
Green hasn’t been the only batter to struggle for runs on home soil, with batting averages dropping dramatically over the last decade, slipping from 42.04 during the 2015/16 season to 26.33 across the last couple of summers. McDonald recognised it had been a factor for Green, with his two best Test knocks coming outside Australia, in Ahmedabad, India, and Wellington.
“The seam movement has been challenging,” he said. “The numbers are down from what they usually are, and even Steve Smith, arguably our greatest batter, has been challenged in home conditions. Unfortunately, Cam’s two (Test) centuries have come overseas as well, and I think that’s what the Australian public has front of mind, what they do in the Australian summer. He has had some decent form lines overseas, in particular the West Indies, where his percentage of runs within that series was quite high.”
Green made 184 runs in an extremely low-scoring series in the Caribbean, which even saw West Indies dismissed for a staggeringly small total of 27.
