Australia off-spinner Nathan Lyon low-key but just as laudable

There will never be another Shane Warne, but the middling off-spinner has benefited Australia, writes Osman Samiuddin.

Nathan Lyon has been a mainstay in Australia's cricket team after selectors experimented several spinners since the retirement of Shane Warne. Eranga Jayawardena / AP Photo

Nathan Lyon has 200 Test wickets. An Australia off-spinner has 200 Test wickets. An Australia spinner post-Shane Warne has 200 Test wickets.

Each of those sentences, like a superhero Hollywood trilogy, is more improbable than the last.

Six years ago, Lyon had taken up a job on the Adelaide Oval groundstaff as a curator. He was basically a net bowler at the time, able as part of his job, to train with the Redbacks, the South Australia first-class side.

A few months later he was helping the Redbacks win the Big Bash. The following year he was in Australia’s Test squad, and on debut, picking up Kumar Sangakkara no less with his first ball in Test cricket (part of a five-fer).

In modern cricket but especially in modern Australian cricket, that path is as outright surreal as it gets.

Still, 50 years ago you could say that may not have been such a unique story – an Australia off-spinner with 200 Test wickets? That is uncharted territory, where he stands lone and proud.

Australia is no country for off-spin, not for those from the opposition – a succession of whom have struggled in the land – nor from within.

In fact, Lyon was in uncharted territory as early as June last year, when he went past Hugh Trumble as the highest wicket-taking Australia off-spinner – as a mark of just how unAustralian off-spin is, Trumble’s mark of 141 wickets had stood for well over a century.

Lyon did it in the West Indies, in a low-key series, with a low-key wicket (of Kraigg Brathwaite) – in the understated style that so becomes him, with none of the pomp of Australia’s other landmarks, such as Warne’s 700th Test wicket, or Glenn McGrath’s 500th.

Two hundred wickets is barely a landmark these days, yet this one needs to be acknowledged for no other reason than it has come after Warne took his last wicket, a decade ago next January.

In that time Australia have searched in vain for a replacement, burning through 11 specialist spinners. Leggies, offies, slow left-armers, batsmen who bowl spin, spinners who bat, all kinds. In third, fourth and fifth place on the list of spinners after Warne (in terms of wickets taken) sit Michael Clarke, Steve Smith and Marcus North. It has been that barren.

Only one other spinner, another low-key, understated off-spinning Nathan – Hauritz – came close to acquiring a sense of permanence. But with Lyon, Australia seem to have finally understood a truth that should have been evident the day Warne retired: he cannot be replaced and that is fine. That is the way of sport, the way of life.

And somehow, in this unforgiving country for his kind, Lyon has not only survived but thrived. He has never been a big turner of the ball but that does not matter much to the offie in Australia. It is bounce that is more important and Lyon has been able to play around with that by the amount of overspin he can generate.

His record at home – 101 wickets in 26 Tests in a country where only Graeme Swann has any recent success as an off-spinner – is outstanding, more so because he will only ever be support to pace attacks.

Outside Australia, and especially in Asia is where he is expected to thrive and establish himself, but he has generally found himself overshadowed by direct opponents: just as he has out-bowled most spinners in Australia, so too have Ravichandran Ashwin in India, Rangana Herath in Sri Lanka, Yasir Shah and Zulfiqar Babar in the UAE out-bowled him.

Indeed, it feels somehow apt that his 200th wicket came in a losing cause in Asia, on a day that tilted the Test away from Australia, a day on which Lyon would have been expected to drive home Australian advantage.

And somebody else who was not Lyon – Herath in this case – took home the laurels instead.

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