Neil Harvey, the 97-year-old former Australia captain who was a member of the famed teams of Don Bradman, is still watching Test cricket with interest. Not a lot of it is impressing him.
In a wide-ranging interview with British newspaper The Guardian, Harvey spoke about how he has been disappointed with the England team that has toured Australia this year, trailing the five-match series 1-3 as the fifth Test goes into a final day on Thursday. Harvey himself had been an attack-first run-scorer, so he is not too harsh on England and their much-maligned ‘Bazball’ template. But he feels they do not understand how to rein it in.
“I’ve been disappointed in England. I think the way they approach the batting side of things, they get too reckless, nobody seems to want to build an innings, like a (Colin) Cowdrey or a (Geoffrey) Boycott,” Harvey told The Guardian.
“It might work against ordinary teams but when you get a class side like Australia it’s a different ballgame. I used to score runs relatively quickly, and everyone gets a lot of enjoyment out of it, but when you try to play this Bazball thing it takes the odds away from winning an important Test. I’d like to see them pull their hooves in,” Harvey added.
The man who shared the crease with Bradman, and played 79 Tests and scored over 6000 runs between 1948 and 1963, is critical of the state of modern cricket. “There are so many poor cricket teams playing international cricket, I only wish I’d have played against them,” he said.
That isn’t to say that he is not a fan of some modern-day players. Again, unsurprisingly, they happen to be of the classical mould: Kane Williamson and Joe Root. “They’ve been the best batsmen for quite some time, I guess it’s time someone else took a bit of responsibility and challenged them for that,” Harvey added.