Prince EWS
Global Moderator
Yeah, I can't really disagree with this.I'm with Chappell here. Anyone can bowl negatively in cricket. You toss the ball to Marcus North, Andrew McDonald or Michael Clarke and they won't go for any more runs than a specialist defensive bowler would. Or you could just tell Johnson or Siddle to bowl a foot outside off stump. "Keeping it tight" isn't a skill that deserves a place in a test team.
Still wouldn't pick Krejza. It's not that he's too attacking, he's just bad.
I was Krejza's biggest supporter - in fact, I'm pretty sure I was the only one outside of the selectors and Jason's mother who thought he should have been on that tour to India - but he's become seriously over-rated since then by many people and I've never been of the opinion that he should be playing Tests outside the subcontinent. I still think he's going to be useful in certain conditions but he shouldn't be playing in England.
The selectors are only cheating themselves in picking Hauritz though. Before the tour of South Africa, their general line of thought was that they needed to have a spinner play every Test... but because they didn't have a good one, they decided to start picking one who wasn't going to have any impact on the game either positively or negatively when he came on. Hauritz just puts Tests on pause. It really defeats the purpose of what they're trying to achieve by picking a spinner regardless (which I disagree with anyway) as Hauritz doesn't really offer what you'd expect from a front-line spinner even on the occasions he bowls "well" and does his job. McDonald does Hauritz's bowling job to a better standard than Hauritz and can bat too... or better yet, we can do away with the joke of a role and pick someone likely to take a wicket (Lee).